4 From Peake to Liora: Experiencing Potential and Perspective

Mervyn Peake’s writing and Liora’s adventures share a striking insight: the world, whether visible or imagined, is structured potential actualised through perspective. By reading them together, we can see relational ontology operating across both literary reflection and narrative enactment.

1. Peake’s Marvels and Climates of the Mind

“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.”

Peake presents the world as structured potential, activated by attention and imagination. Artistic translation — painting or writing — is a second-order construal, communicating first-order phenomena without reducing them to static objects.

2. Peake’s Fish of the Imagination

“Life is an effort to grip… 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.”

Here, potentiality is temporal and perspectival: the “fish” exist in the system of imagination until grasped — instantiated — in attention and creative effort. Those not actualised remain dormant, yet part of the relational field of possibility.

3. Liora’s Encounter with the Fish

Liora’s adventure concretises these principles:

• The river teeming with fantastical fish = structured potential.

• Each fish grasped by Liora = instance / perspectival actualisation.

• The lived, mutable experience of each fish = construal / first-order phenomenon.

• Collecting and observing the fish = second-order construal, analogous to artistic translation.

The story adds a narrative, experiential dimension, showing how relational ontology is not only a lens for theory but also a guide for imaginative engagement.

4. Relational Continuity Across Literature and Narrative

Across Peake’s prose and Liora’s story:

1. System / potential underlies perception and imagination.

2. Instance / actualisation occurs through attention, grasp, or creative action.

3. Construal / phenomenon emerges as the lived experience, mutable and context-dependent.

4. Second-order construal allows communication, reflection, and artistic expression.

The insights of relational ontology — the dependence of experience on perspective, the dynamism of potential, and the relational nature of meaning — are made vivid, whether through Peake’s luminous metaphors or Liora’s playful adventures.

In essence: imagination, perception, and creativity are not about capturing pre-existing objects but about navigating, actualising, and experiencing the structured potential of the world. Peake and Liora together demonstrate how relational ontology illuminates not just thought and physics, but the very art of seeing and living.