1 Seeing, Grasping, and Instantiating: Mervyn Peake Through the Lens of Relational Ontology

Mervyn Peake’s writing frequently gestures toward a profound relational insight: the world we perceive is not a collection of objects existing independently, but a field of phenomena actualised through attention, imagination, and construal. Two quotes in particular crystallise this view:

“As I see it, or as I want to see it, the marvels of the visible world are not things in themselves but revelations to stir the imagination — to conduct us to amazing climates of the mind, which climates it is for the artist to translate into paint or into words.”

“As I see it, life is an effort to grip, before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.”

1. Marvels as revelations, not things-in-themselves

Peake immediately rejects the notion of phenomena as independent “things-in-themselves.” In relational terms, the marvels of the world correspond to structured potentials, not pre-given actualities. The act of perceiving or attending to them is the instantiation of potential, a perspectival cut through the field of possibility.

The artist’s task — translating these marvels into paint or words — is itself a second-order construal: a construal of a construal. What emerges on canvas or page is a communicable trace of first-order phenomena, rendered intelligible and sharable, but never identical to the underlying potential.

The “climates of the mind” metaphorically capture these perspectival spaces: the patterned potentials of the world are actualised differently according to each observer’s attention, inclination, and imaginative engagement.

2. Life as grasping the fish of the imagination

In the second quote, Peake likens imagination to a river teeming with “startling… or blindingly exquisite fish” — potentialities that exist until grasped. Here, life itself is recast as the continuous effort to instantiate potential phenomena: each fish caught is an actualisation, a concrete manifestation of what was previously merely possible.

The fleetingness of these imagined fish — their tendency to slip into “oblivion’s black ocean” — illustrates a key relational principle: potential not actualised is not destroyed, but remains uninstantiated within the system. Time, attention, and construal determine which possibilities become lived phenomena and which remain dormant.

3. Relational ontology in Peake’s imagination

Across both quotes, several relational themes emerge:

1. World as structured potential: Phenomena are possibilities structured for perspectival engagement.

2. Instantiation through perception and imagination: Actual experience arises only when attention, desire, or action selects a trajectory through potential.

3. Second-order construals: Artistic rendering, memory, or shared communication represents a further cut — a construal of already instantiated phenomena.

4. Temporal and perspectival contingency: Both perception and imagination are ephemeral and context-dependent; potential is never fully captured outside instantiation.

In Peake’s luminous phrasing, relational ontology is not an abstract theory but a lived semiotics of the imagination. Marvels, fish, and climates of the mind are not objects waiting to be recorded; they are perspectival actualisations of a richly structured potential, endlessly renewed by the acts of seeing, grasping, and translating.