Letters from Alvina Krause: Creative Imagination and Shakespeare -- Winter 1974

Context
By winter quarter 1974 I was posting notes on my bulletin board. I sent Krause a copy of each set of notes and she returned it with her responses. I include only those parts of my notes that are necessary to give context to her responses.

Bulletin Board Notes on The Creative Imagination
I wrote a long essay about metaphor and the actor with nods to Hedda Gabler and the army pistol and Desdemona as a rose, including this passage written in my best AK manner:
"...What is a rose? Form? all right -- but everything else has form -- what is the exact, unique form of a rose? Can you capture that form in your body, sense it, create it, transfer it to yourself? Beauty? All right -- but what precisely is the beauty of a rose that is not the beauty of any other thing...."

In the margin AK wrote this:
Good.
Continue on the "action" words. On behavior resulting from action --
A rose turns to the sun, sways with the breeze -- droops in the drought and heat --
bends

At the end of the notes, she wrote this:
You are terrific in concepts -- But develop ability to touch off creative action by the use of creative action.
Your fantasy [an assignment in which an actor plays one of a given human being, animal, or object, creating a pantomimed story involving all three -- DD] again needs explicit action.
Use "if" more
Everyone has a pistol within him -- go on develop, illustrate -- its power to destroy
He also has a mouse within him -- who peeks out, etc. --
Everyone has a peacock within who preens his feathers, steps high, etc. --
If pistol, mouse, peacock collide [Hedda Gabler, Tesman, Judge Brack -- DD]
???

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Context
In her responses to my notes to the Shakespeare class, Krause continued to point me toward illustration by direct action.

My notes on creating the reality of A Midsummer-Night's Dream
In the notes I eventually get to this statement:
"...play the play, play the drama to create the beauty, the magic, the joy of a mid-summer night's dream -- to create the truth in 'Love is blind'."

In the margin she wrote this:
Illustrate: 
A night to do as you please, to race into the woods.
You are in a wood, at midnight -- trees, shadows -- crickets -- a cow moos, a bush shivers -- you see a pair of eyes -- owl? 
No -- it has horns!

A bit farther on:
You are so right, but you stop short of the images, action metaphors, which motivate -- imagine -- "It is midsummer night -- anything can happen --- you are in a wood -- there's an open space -- a stage --moonlight -- you start out 'to be or not to be' a donkey brays, dances in the moonlight" etc. etc.

Later in my Midsummer notes:
Men -- toss your capes joyfully over your shoulder, stride vigorously through this world, perch that cap with the feather in it on your head and bolt off into the forest.

Krause:
You want --- what? a girl? money? Fame?

Me:
And Bottom?

Krause:
You want to act -- so does Bottom. To act you need a loud voice. So does Bottom. Do it -- No -- a deep voice, etc. etc.
Bottom is anyone who wants to act -- He dreams -- Titania -- Elizabeth Taylor ----

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Context
My journal

Krause's Comment
Ideas are only starting points -- The good teacher takes them into action.
Hedda is a pistol, Hedda is afraid of society, Hedda tempts Lovborg
etc.
Human beings are made up of opposites -- part reaches to the stars, part follows the herd: be a lark, be a sheep --
Macbeth is a 1) Great soldier, even a poet 2) Macbeth wants a throne.
Honor vs. base ambition
Eagle vs.  ?