Fueling the Dream Spririt

Ask any author — after a presentation to a roomful of kids, hands shoot up, arms wave madly, and here comes the Big Daddy of Questions: “Where do you get your ideas?” I find it a tough question to answer. Inspiration, creativity, muses . . . it’s all so vague and mysterious-sounding.

The best explanation I’ve found begins with a cross-cultural leap for most of us. According to the principles of Chinese medicine (rooted in Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism), we have five spirits residing in our bodies. The most important of these for creative expression are the Hun, or dream spirit, and the Po, or animal spirit.

The Hun enters the body around birth and “rests” in the liver. Like the Judeo-Christian concept of the soul, the Hun comes from the heavens and is eternal. It gives us the capacity to envision, to be inspired, and to have a sense of direction. During the day, the Hun shines out of the eyes, echoing the Western concept of the eyes as the window of the soul. At night, the Hun swims away from the body during dreaming. In the lovely quasi-dream state between asleep and awake, the drifting, floating sensation you feel is the movement of the Hun. Disturbed sleep and vivid nightmares show that the Hun is distressed.

The Hun is restless, constantly moving, exploring, searching, imagining. It’s like a fire — the more fuel you throw on, the brighter it burns. At death, the Hun leaves the body from the top of the head to return to the heavens, still retaining an individual identity. In the East, these are the ancestral spirits worshipped at shrines. In the West, angels watch over us from above.

The balance to the Hun is the Po, or animal spirit. The Po is responsible for our senses — the ability to taste, smell, see, hear, and touch. It controls instinctive, gut-level reactions, as well as our physical vitality. You can see healthy Po everywhere: a six-year-old pretending to be a cantering horse; a construction worker casually walking an I-beam high above the ground. It’s a pleasure to watch the well-developed, trained Po of athletes and dancers.

Unlike the heavenly Hun, the Po comes from the earth and “rests” in the lungs. Its earthiness balances and tethers the Hun. At death it leaves the body from the anus and returns to the earth, losing all separate sense of self. It’s said that, long ago, Chinese herbalists used to scrape up the dirt below men who’d been publicly hung and add it to their formulas for those suffering from poor vitality.

I’m fascinated by the power of the animal and dream spirits and often write about them in their many manifestations. In my retelling of a Japanese folktale, Kogi’s Mysterious Journey, a Buddhist monk, distraught about his painting abilities, falls into a lake and is magically transformed into a fish. Restored to human form after having his Po experience being a fish, he is able to beautifully paint fish in lifelike glory with his brush and rice paper. In Oranges on Golden Mountain, I wrote about a lonely boy in nineteenth-century California who visits his faraway mother when his Hun jumps on the back of a dragon and travels to China to see her.

But, short of plunging into magical lakes and riding dragons, just how do artists — of all kinds — keep their Hun freely moving? How do they cultivate the Hun, transform it, and bring it forth
to touch other people? I’ve written biographies of three creative, difficult people—Dorothea Lange, Woody Guthrie, and John Lennon—closely examining their lives, looking for answers.

Dorothea Lange, most famous for her iconic Depression photograph of the Migrant Mother, had an intense need to affect people with her photos. Unlike her friend Ansel Adams, she wasn’t particularly interested in photographic technique. She wanted a good print that would create an emotional resonance in viewers. She worked hard to capture Americans caught in painfully difficult situations, their pride and spirit intact.

Lange was always aware of people’s physical vitality as she photographed. Cut down by polio as a child, she walked with a rolling gait, pulling one foot forward. It left her with a keen awareness of the subtle ways vitality manifested itself. To her photographic eye, any part of the body could express a person’s Po: work-worn hands clutching a sweaty hat, a pair of bare feet walking a dusty path, a sharecropper bent over his hoe in the field. She loved to photograph people from behind, saying an expressive photo of someone’s back could reveal as much as one taken from the front.

Lange claimed she’d been born tired, but out in the field, in the heat and wind and dirt, or in the darkroom late at night, she pushed herself to the point of exhaustion, the restless urgency of her Hun pushing her weaker Po. “With me it was always expenditure to the last ditch,” she said.

What drove her to work this hard? Perhaps she said it best, in a note scribbled in her journal late in her life. “The secret places of the heart,” she wrote, “are the real mainsprings of one’s actions.”

Music, like the visual arts, is another way our Hun finds expression. Woody Guthrie, who wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” was well aware of the power of music to inspire and touch others. A brilliant, self-centered man, Guthrie saw his life marked by the tragic deaths of his sister and daughter in fires and by Huntington’s Disease, which destroyed his mother and, ultimately, him. Growing up in the Dust Bowl, he honed his skills as a musician and composer to write songs that drew people together, gave them hope, and lobbied for social change.

Guthrie was infamous for hitting the road when things were tough, or boring, or just too damn good. As he readily admitted, songs came best to him out on the open road, shed of all responsibility. To fuel his eager Hun, he spent his life crisscrossing America, thumbing and walking his way along our highways.

As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway,
I saw below me a golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

But Guthrie needed more than just solitude and wide-open vistas. Rambling from place to place, his Po soaked in the sights and sounds and stories of far-flung Americans. His Hun, inspired, delivered Guthrie’s gritty paradox of patriotism and outrage, as in this less familiar verse of “This Land”:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people —
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
This land was made for you and me.

My recent biography of John Lennon brought me out of the Great Depression and WWII and into the cultural ferment of the sixties. Of all the people we’ve shoved forward to be our visionaries, Lennon was the most fascinating to me. I found him tempestuous, terrified, vulnerable, brilliant, and intensely charismatic. Like Lange and Guthrie, his life was difficult: his mother handed him off to a sister to raise while she lived nearby with her next two children. The sudden death of his mother, just as he was getting to know her, was devastating.

Even as a child, Lennon’s Hun was highly active — almost too active. “I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way that always saw beyond the mask,” he said. “Neither my auntie nor my friends nor anybody could ever see it! And it’s very, very scary.”

Lennon pushed himself to the edge of every experience — drugs, sex, rock ’n’ roll — then jumped off in wholehearted abandon. By the late sixties, he was in a freefall, his Hun dangerously out of control. “If I am on my own for three days, doing nothing, I almost leave myself completely,” he explained. “I’m just not here.” He said he was either at the back of his head, or outside his body, watching himself.

In 1975, after years of being a superstar, Lennon retreated to his apartment at the Dakota in New York City with Yoko Ono and their infant son Sean. He reemerged in 1980 and began recording again. Before heading for the studio on what would be the last day of his life, he and Yoko were photographed by Annie Leibovitz. My favorite image from this session is a simple, straightforward headshot. Lennon looks directly at the camera. His face is relaxed and open, and you see how totally he trusts the photographer. The Hun shines from his eyes. Under his eyes are delicate lavender smudges. Right there, you see the vulnerability of his Po, and that it isn’t strong enough to contain his Hun. It never quite was.

Several years ago my father, Rondal Partridge, and I gave a presentation on Dorothea Lange at the San Francisco Public Library. A photographer himself, my father had been Lange’s assistant. The audience was packed with teenagers lured by the promise of extra credit in history class. The ennui was palpable. Suddenly my father grabbed his mike and leaned forward. “Listen,” he said. “Any time you get a good idea, write it down. By the time you turn twenty-five, your pelvic bones will fuse, and you won’t have another good idea in your life.” The temperature in the room shot up about ten degrees.

He was onto something: the dance of the Po and Hun. Lots of Hun for dreaming and imagining, with a Po that’s strong — but not too rigid — to ground the Hun in the material world.

That’s a lot to explain to a group of kids who have other burning questions, like “How much money do you make?” Fortunately, there’s a short answer to where ideas come from: writers and composers and photographers are just like everybody else. We daydream, get bored, walk alone down a ribbon of highway, linger for a few delicious moments between asleep and awake. We’ve just trained ourselves to pay attention to what the Hun is whispering to us. So pick up a camera or a guitar, a set of watercolors or a pencil. Throw a little fuel on the fire for your Hun and watch what happens. With a little encouragement you can keep it going, even after pelvic fusion.

Elizabeth Partridge is a doctor of Oriental medicine and an acupuncturist. She is the author of Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange, This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie, and John Lennon: All I Want Is the Truth (all Viking) and is currently working on a novel.