The river was not a river in any ordinary sense. Its waters shimmered in multiple directions at once: each current a possibility, each ripple an event that might or might not be. Liora stepped carefully onto the bank, feeling the weight of possibility beneath her feet. Every stone, every flicker of reflected light, seemed alive with what could be — and yet nothing had yet been actualised.
This was the River of Becoming.
1. Currents of Potential
Liora noticed that the river’s flow was not linear. Some currents twisted back upon themselves, others leapt into sudden eddies. She realised that each swirl was like a cut — a moment where potential became instance.
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Some eddies held forms she had recognised before; patterns that seemed familiar.
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Others shimmered with shapes she had never encountered, latent and waiting.
She understood intuitively: the river did not carry these forms. It revealed them, each in its own moment, each perspectival.
The river, Liora thought, was like language itself: a network of potentialities, waiting to be cut, to be instantiated, to be felt.
2. The River Speaks in Moments
As she walked along the bank, she noticed voices — not human, not animal, but the resonance of events themselves.
A current twisted suddenly, and a cluster of lights coalesced into a brief vision: a bird alighting on a branch, a word forming in the air, a clause settling into rhythm. Each was an instance of the river’s potential. Liora saw that the river was not flowing for her — it flowed independently. Yet she could perceive its instantiation, its cut into actuality, in the same moment she experienced it.
Logogenesis, she realised, was the unfolding of the river in time — the sequence of cuts and configurations, the narrative of becoming itself. But the river’s potential was never exhausted; each step she took revealed new paths, new eddies, new cuts.
3. Patterns in the Shimmer
Some currents seemed to resonate with one another. Patterns emerged: a cluster of sparks here, a spiral of light there. They were recurrent, not fixed — like the sedimented moves of culture, practiced but not obligatory.
Liora recognised that these were the river’s registers, its subpotentials: the familiar forms that structured possibility, giving shape to the chaos without imprisoning it. She could follow them, navigate them, but never own them.
The river did not obey a map. It did not reproduce itself mechanically. It was neither fully process nor fully structure — it was the experience of both, simultaneously, shimmering across the instantiation of potential.
4. The Seduction of Flow
She felt tempted to call the river “becoming” in the Whiteheadian sense. Every eddy, every flash of light, seemed ontologically real, independent, unstoppable. She could almost believe that the river itself was alive, that each cut was a new actual occasion, and that she merely witnessed it.
But a deeper awareness held her back. She sensed the perspectival cut: she did not produce the river. She did not “flow” with it. She perceived instantiation from her position, experiencing the temporal unfolding — the logogenesis — without mistaking it for ontological production.
5. Liora and the River of Language
At the river’s edge, Liora realised the truth: the river was language, and language was the river. But language was not a river of being; it was a river of possibility actualised in moments of perception and construal.
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Each word, each clause, each utterance was a cut.
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Each perceived shift was a moment of logogenesis.
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The currents themselves were the latent systemic potential, shimmering, waiting, never exhausted.
She stepped back, feeling the vertigo of possibility, exhilarated and disciplined at once. The river flowed endlessly, and she understood that understanding itself was a cut — perspectival, relational, and infinitely rich.
Closing
The river of becoming was a dance between potential and instance, shimmer and sediment, possibility and cut. Liora knew she could not own it, nor could she tame it. But in perceiving it — moment by moment, eddy by eddy — she glimpsed what a rigorously relational engagement with process might feel like: vivid, dynamic, and disciplined by perspective.
In the next post, we return to analysis. We will step out of Liora’s mythic river and examine, sharply, how Whitehead’s actual occasions compare to Halliday’s instance pole, and why the distinctions we stabilised in Post 1 are indispensable.
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