2 Catching the Fish That Isn’t There: On the Aesthetics of Vanishing Form

Mervyn Peake: 

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.

There are moments of aesthetic experience that resist articulation—not because they are vague, but because they occur at the very edge of what articulation can stabilise.

I have often found this in the writing of Mervyn Peake. His descriptions of imagination and perception produce a peculiar effect: one feels something intensely—almost physically—yet struggles to say what, exactly, has been encountered. The difficulty is not a failure. It is a clue.

What Peake offers is not a description of beauty as a property of things, nor as a harmony of form. Rather, he writes from within a more precarious condition: the moment in which something almost becomes.

For Peake, the visible world is not self-sufficient. It does not present meaning ready-made. It provokes. It stirs. It conducts the perceiver toward what he calls “amazing climates of the mind.” But these climates are not stable territories waiting to be explored. They are volatile, shifting, fugitive. The imagination, in his famous metaphor, is a current in which “startling, ghastly, or blindingly exquisite fish” appear only to vanish again.

This double instability is crucial.

On the one hand, the world does not offer meaning as possession.

On the other, the imagination does not hold meaning as a repository.

Between them, the artist does not translate a pre-existing content. The artist intercepts.

And interception, here, is always under threat of loss.

This is where Peake’s aesthetic diverges from more familiar accounts of beauty. Beauty is not the perception of a stable form, nor the recognition of order. It is the experience of instability briefly sustained. Something gathers—just enough to be felt—and in the same movement begins to slip.

What we call the sublime, in this register, is not vastness or terror, but the co-presence of forming and unforming. One does not stand before something overwhelming; one is caught within a process that both produces and withdraws what is being experienced.

And yet, this process is almost always misrecognised.

It feels as though something is being grasped—something that might otherwise be lost. Peake’s imagery is saturated with this urgency: the hand reaching to “grip” before the imagined fish slips back into oblivion. The aesthetic experience presents itself as a narrow rescue, a fleeting capture.

But this is the crucial turn.

What if nothing is being caught?

What if the “object” of aesthetic experience does not pre-exist the act of grasping, but is constituted in that act? What if the fish is not something retrieved from a prior domain, but something that only comes into being in the moment of attempted capture?

From this perspective, aesthetic experience is not the recovery of something that would otherwise be lost. It is the actualisation of a cut in a field of potential—a momentary stabilisation that appears, from within itself, as something rescued from disappearance.

The sense of loss is not an accident. It is structural.

Actualisation wears the mask of recovery.

This is why such experiences are so difficult to articulate. The moment one tries to fix what was felt, one risks transforming it into the very kind of stable object that was never there to begin with. The articulation arrives just as the phenomenon withdraws.

And yet, this does not render aesthetic appreciation impossible. On the contrary, it reframes it.

To appreciate Peake’s writing—or any work that operates in this register—is not primarily a matter of taste or judgement. It is a matter of attunement. A sensitivity to the moment in which something is neither fully formed nor fully absent, but precariously holding.

One learns, gradually, to notice the flicker.

Not to grasp it.

Not to preserve it.

But to remain, however briefly, within the condition that allows it to appear at all.