Icicles Arising in the Forests of the North

So I saw this image over at The Rejectionist's blog. Over there, it was a tribute to the designer, Alexander McQueen, who just passed away (I think - my fashion knowledge is, um, limited. "Is that from the GAP?" Ink asked). Here, though, I have a different reason to post it up (since you don't want to hear me commenting on fashion... really, you don't).

I saw this picture and had an instant reaction, a creative reaction, a sudden sense of a world opening up as if a deep mist had been peeled away. And yet the mist, the mystery, lingers in the picture itself.

And this is one of the oddities of writing, isn't it? The puzzling randomness of inspiration, the way an image, a sound, a thought, is pulled into the mind and set suddenly to rattling and humming about, a firefly alit and trembling with energy. So bright, so incandescent, that it lights other thoughts and worlds, even sets a strange fire to them.

This, to me, is the electric nature of creativity. The flash and heat of it. All that heat from such a cool picture, with the chill mist of the veil, the ruffled snow of lace, the antlers plucked neatly from the heart of some vast primordial icicle. What a strange antlered goddess, and to so suddenly thrust her divinity into my brain... a thing of myth, almost. A little captured something... a something I want to release with words, to explore, to discover. Stories seem to abound and shimmer around this image, haunting the edges.

And yet how mercurial. A blog post, a memorial to a fashion designer I'd never heard of... a firefly in a bottle, translucent light shining through upon a new world or perhaps upon an old world, a world of ice and snow and fog-drenched forests, a world of weary men gathered around a fire and singing of the antlered goddess as stars flicker to cold life in a far black sky...