Hoffmann And A Good Yarn

Dearest readers,

I promise to share with you the colours and natural beauty of our winter holiday very soon but today I feel compelled to link up with Ginny's Yarn Along over at Small Things. In this space she shares her love of knitting and reading and invites others to reveal which books and patterns are tickling their current fancy.

My knitting needs little introduction:

I hope to join the tail end of the current 1705 Madelinetosh Tea Leaves Cardigans over at Ravelry by the end of this week. I am nothing if not original! This pattern was carefully chosen with my eldest daughter Héloïse for her post Christmas gift and is - please listen out for the shrill blast of trumpets - my first adult-sized pullover project to date after two years of knitting.  Héloïse was unshakable in her choice of Malabrigo Worsted despite my various attempts at seducing her to choose Madelinetosh.  Her choice of colour - Black Forest - was perfect for our holiday destination.... More on that soon.

My book, Hoffmann's Nutcracker and Mouse King, was chosen initially for its obvious Christmas season overtones.  I wanted to get away from the sugary simplicity of the ballet's libretto (which I love really) and turn to the original fairy tale with its darker, more violent atmosphere. Aside from being a wonderful piece of escapism for these long wintery nights its central message has struck a chord with me and is, I believe, important to all of us.

In his introduction to this tale Jack Zipes explains that E.T.A. Hoffmann was never able to discard his middle-class social conditioning to become a free-spirited artist.  When he wrote Nutcracker and Mouse King in 1816 Hoffmann had observed how the children of bourgeois families were overly regulated.  Zipes writes "they were drilled to behave according to moral and ethical principles that were to curb their imagination".  The question that Hoffmann asks in Nutcracker and Mouse King is how to free the children's imaginations so that they may fulfill their desires.  It is no coincidence that the parents of the two children, Marie and Fritz, bear the surname Stahlbaum, or "Steel Tree".  They are indeed inflexible and made nervous by the threatening figure of the godfather Drosselmeier with his creative mind and eerie stories.

 If Marie's family believes she talks nonsense Drosselmeier is struck by the manner in which she marries her visions and dreams with the everyday world which surrounds her.  As the tale draws to an end Hoffmann wrote " Marie suposedly is still queen of a land where you can see sparkling Christmas Forests everywhere as well as translucent Marzipan Castles -- in short, the most splendid and most wondrous things, if you only have the right eyes to see them with." (My italics.)

And so I dedicate this post to my seven-year old Tristan whose creative energy is a force to be reckoned with (REALLY) although his baroque guitar playing and detailed explanations concerning the composition of the pieces he plays help ease my knotted neck muscles at the end of a day.

I shall leave you with Hoffmann's following description of the Marzipan Castle:

"A rose red brightly shimmering castle with a hundred airy turrets... the dark, burning colors simply dazzled as they heightened the rosy tint against the white ground.  The vast dome of the central building as well as the pyramid-shaped roofs of the turrets were strewn with a thousand gold and silver twinkling stars."

And Tristan's own version of this enchanted palace which is big enough to cover our entire dining table:

I wish you all a peaceful and imaginative new year.  I know I will be endeavouring in 2012 to see the everyday world with Marie's imaginative eyes... most of the time ;-)

I'll return soon.

A bientôt,

from Tristan and Stephanie