Of Yeats and yoga mats

I’ ve just read 8 Signs Your Yoga Practice is Culturally Appropriated, which warned that the image of yoga is often associated with “white, thin, able- bodied, middle- class women.” Well, that’s a horror. I am retiring the yoga mat forever.

The lament over yoga appropriation is risible on the face of it ( recall the recent kerfuffle at the University of Ottawa). And there have been many equally risible examples of late as the strictures of trigger- warning brigades sprout like weeds from university campuses — composing new cultural crimes by the hour, and painting fresh scarlet letters on all who dissent from their trite obsessions. Check out Portland, Ore., site of many “whiteowned appropriative restaurants” and the scandal of two white women selling — avert your children’s eyes — burritos. Have we not an international court of criminal justice precisely for such malefactions?

For consequential examples of what might be called cultural appropriation — and I am far from endorsing the phrase as having either a settled or substantive meaning — we may turn to science, more particularly the scientific method. That method is simply the most powerful and successful cognitive mechanism in the history of our kind and it is, more or less, the product of Western thought. Its beginnings can be variously dated, but we can be content with assigning it to the Enlightenment period, with its elevation of observation, measurement and experiment as tools of rational inquiry, and the recognition of mathematics as a peerless guide to understanding of nature.

Is the scientific method a cultural practice? Does it adhere to a particular culture? If we agree that European thought from, say, the 17 th century on, is an expression and characteristic of European culture, I’d say yes. Refined by practice and innovation, the scientific method having demonstrated i ts sovereignty in so many fields, it has been adopted the world over.

Do we call this cultural appropriation? Hardly. For it is another fixture of the human mind that the creation of one person, or the invention of another, the poetic achievement of a third, becomes by various routes — osmosis, collaboration, competition, imitation and more than any the desire to share what is good — not so much the property but the common resource of all. Were this not so, the Italians, whose illuminati Galileo, Copernicus, Tyco Brahe, Kepler did so much to beget modern science, would have a case against every PBS special on the Cosmos for appropriating their science. And Neil deGrasse Tyson would be off Twitter.

It is when we move to art, however, and especially to literature, that the notion of cultural appropriation becomes even more tenuous, more resistant to a proper understanding of how art or literature works. Here we are in the domain of imagination proper. Allow me a few axioms. All literature exists in a relation to all other literature. Literature is forged in the imagination, and the imagination feeds upon and is fired by literature. Words are autonomous, they are not owned by anyone. Literature takes its inspiration from life, language and other literature. Nothing is created without precedent. The imagination is its own country — its allegiance is to excellence and purity of achievement. Many countries have produced great writers: all great writers are their own country.

With these few axioms in mind, let us take the case of Homer. The tales of Troy, and the two epics Homer fashioned around them ( out of a precedent oral tradition), have fertilized a whole universe of literature since. Just go with the big names: Virgil fed on Homer, Dante on Homer and Virgil. Milton, saturated with a knowledge of all three, with Paradise Lost re-imagined the epic in a Christian context. In our own time, Joyce built his prose masterwork Ulysses around the bones of the Homeric saga, Yeats saw his much-wanted Maud Gonne as “another Helen,” and Derek Walcott “repositioned” the Trojan war as a “fishermen’s fight” in the Caribbean.

Were these writers cultural appropriators? Or were they artists, powered by their imagination, seeking in the foundational example of Homer, somewhat as apprentices seeking a master, the source and method of poetic technique, the high arts of narrative, and genius in description and imagery?

We do not put a fence around Homer. Nor do we, or should we, balkanize the imagination of creative artists. Good and great art inflects the minds of those who receive it, and even more so, those with the gifts to make their own. It is not an appropriation to seek examples outside one’s experience, it is an imperative to do so. We should not seek to put boundaries on words, or the stories — built with craft and ingenuity — words alone can build. Subject matter as such is but the beginning of artistic enterprise. What the individual imagination does with subject matter is what transmutes it into art. That is not appropriation. Writers take only what they think they can fashion to their own design. That is not disrespect, it is tribute — it is how stories, novels and poems enter into being, and if they are art, real art, more is returned than received.

Boundaries are merely what the human imagination exists to leap over, and the capacity to make that leap is what we call (or used to anyway) creativity in art and literature. Real writers know that. Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?