Ice palace novel: Butterhead Agnes

[pegkerr]

Perhaps I've not ever come right out and said this before, but I've been thinking about this since the State Fair is starting up.

Have I mentioned before that Solveig's mother, Agnes, is a former Princess Kay of the Milky Way? (That's the title of the "goodwill ambassador for Minnesota's dairy industry," sort of the unofficial State Fair Queen). One of the few duties of the Princess Kay is to spend eight hours in a freezer to sit for a portrait, a bust of her head which is carved out of butter.



So: A harvest queen, sort of a late summer queen, who enters a freezer, a winter environment, to have her portrait made. Suggestive, eh? [Edited to add: Okay, you're right, it's a fridge, not a freezer. Still, the fact the temperature must be lowered and something is sculpted is suggestive.] And you know that winter magic is all about solids, about form, about sculpture, as ice, the embodiment of winter magic, forms over the tops of lakes and ice is sculpted and shaped into ice sculptures and ice palaces.

Summer magic is about about the network, connections, the spaces-in-between. Winter magic is the solid, the sculpture, the form.

What do you want to bet that Agnes has kept that butter sculpture of herself as the summer queen in her deep freezer all these years?

And what do you want to bet that somehow that butter bust shows up at the ice palace at the climax of the book?

Don't know how I'll use it, yet, but I know I will. It's like Chekov's gun on the wall. I'll pull the trigger there, somewhere, somehow.

Maybe the cows, somehow, are plotting with the fish.

Comments

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the summer magic is the wild potential (more chaotic and uncontrollable) and the winter magic is accomplishment and study and realization (more focused and/or results-oriented, and man I hate using those terms because they both sound dreadfully corporate-jargony, but you know what I mean I hope.)? The Princess Kay sculpture could then be a way of capturing or formalizing the wild-potential magic of late summer harvest in a more disciplined/structural magic related to the coming winter months.

(What goes on in Agnes's -- or any Princess's -- head while she sits for her sculpture, I wonder?)

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Harvest. Maybe summer magic is about harvesting things in their natural time and then feeding people (and animals, and the compost heap) with them. You know, the great circle of life thing.

In which case, winter magic might be an attempt to stop the wheel. Freeze it, "save" it - can a thing be saved if it is never used? What if it's intended to be used, but is instead frozen and hoarded, taken out of the cycle?

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm... like a preserving magic, stopping the natural flow (e.g., water to ice). Originally, perhaps, a way to keep enough magic/supplies to eke out an existence through the winter months, or to jumpstart spring (during the thaw)? And, as you point out, it's not a permanent solution -- hoarded frozen things do spoil, just more slowly. (I should point out that I live in Florida, so my understanding of deep freezing is limited to my freezer.)