Helen Mulder

The story of my life as I have told it to myself includes being born on the coldest day ever recorded in history of the United States--a record broken only quite recently--when on February 10th, 1933, the temperature in West Yellowstone was recorded at seventy degrees below zero. In Logan, my birthplace, it was just forty below. But even as a newcomer, I must have noticed that it was a cold, if not cruel, world I had come into. My parents were impressed and convinced themselves, and me, that there was something wonderful about my birth. I have achieved their prophecies and have lately recorded in my India memoirs how I became a goddess. But that is a development which I'll explain later.

Because I learned to walk at eight months and learned to read by the age of three, my parents and grandparents enfolded me in an aura of wonder and admiration. And then, since no other children came into my family to rival my "clouds of glory," for a long time there was no challenge to this illusion. It also created an environment where I was destined to grow up alone, introspective, and bookish. To this day, the characters I have known in literature seem far more real and dear to me than the ordinary folks of my everyday acquaintance.

I early preferred the mythology of the classical world to that of the Judeo-Christian tradition and considered the Bible myths of negligible interest. When I consider why that was so, it could be that my maternal grandfather studied a Classics curriculum at Amherst College in Massachusetts and my mother was herself an English literature M.A. from the University of Michigan in the early 1920's when most western women did not pursue postgraduate studies. My father was a scientist, first a geologist, a teacher, then a medical doctor from Columbia University in New York. My paternal grandfather was a university graduate and a superintendent of schools in Cache Valley. With this overburden, it is evident that from the beginning I was being constantly formed and informed. The landmark books of my early childhood were Alice in Wonderland , with the grinning but disappearing Cheshire cat and the Red Queen who screamed, "off with her head". This wildly imaginative text surely imparted to me a quirky preference for the inventive and absurd. Quite a different book, Robinson Crusoe, suggested to my impressionable self a strong confirmation that I, too, was alone on an island challenged to survive by my wit and endurance, sustained largely by raisins.

I began writing poetry at Ogden High School under the expert and legendary tutelage of Wilson Thornley, an innovator in teaching creative writing. Before his retirement, Mr. Thornley had become the mentor of several professional writers. A lifelong love of poetry and the foundation of my professional career as teacher began, then and there, with a veneration of language and the literary tradition, all richly awakened in my eighteenth year.

Next, at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, I won the freshman poetry prize, a cause for momentary jubilation, but that mood was soon countered by a suicidal depression brought on when I walked through the open stacks in Taylor Library, a Neo-Gothic building with towers and leaded glass windows, and despaired, realizing that I could not, in a hundred lifetimes, be able to absorb the knowledge encapsulated in the shelf after shelf of books each representing the scholarly effort of another human being. And this was just the section on the classics, Greek and Latin. I felt an affinity akin to mystical appreciation for the original texts and the scholarly commentaries. I realized that the throngs of dusty volumes each represented a life of devotion to learning, a living voice from the past. I was vastly outnumbered and overwhelmed. This epiphany created an impossible appetite to know everything--and soon.

It was during that year, also, that I ventured into the college's Neo-Gothic chapel for midmorning services and heard the best and brightest visiting clergy from up and down the east coast. It was the first time I had heard intelligent discourse from a pulpit, and I began to wish in an envious way that I, too, could kneel and cross myself unselfconsciously like the others and feel comfortable doing so. I longed to be part of an ancient and solemn tradition. While the aesthetics were appealing, I was blocked by skepticism and consigned to being always a sympathetic observer.

When I was twenty, my parents sent me to Europe for four months, on the Grand Tour. I was in London in 1953, witness to the Empire's millions who made the pilgrimage to London for Elizabeth II's coronation. My experience of golden coaches and high pomp and circumstance was extremely limited. I was enthralled by the formal protocol, the elaborate and colorful rituals handed down from distant times and adhered to with precision The tattered flags from bygone military campaigns hanging from the chapel at Christ Church College, Oxford; the illustrious figures from history who had paced across the university courtyards; the deep and resonant sense of the past that seeps from the very stones; each cold marble figure reclining atop his sarcophagus awakened an urgent need in me to absorb the totality of meaning of the vast human history, everywhere ambient and insistent. I wrote my parents, "Sell the house and car and come!" My father wisely continued his surgeries to pay for my trip, and I was further isolated from my peers at home in Utah where I saw local history as a paltry thing, reiterated each year and marked with a Pioneer Day Queen, a rodeo and parade.

Back at the University of Utah, I was fortunate to have major professors who could fill those empty spaces in my understanding that I had discovered while in England and Europe. Dr. Clarice Short in Romantic and Victorian poetry; Emil Lucki in English History; Sterling McMurrin, James Jarrett, and Waldemer Read in many philosophy courses, all sped me on my way to a triple major in English, History and Philosophy with Latin as my B.A. language. None could have been finer. I took a few courses in American literature and came to know my future husband.

Through his offices, I secured my first teaching position at the University of Buffalo in 1960. We were married in 1961. Skip over five children. Anyone with a family knows just how the love and concern for children can humanize a person.

The next life-altering experience was our first time in India. I was most reluctant to leave behind my blooming roses, and I suffered agonies of claustrophobia on the 24-hour flight, clinging to my nine-month-old boy as to a life preserver. However, the initial experience of India jolted me out of my comfortably formed self. The "mysterious east" required the creation of a radically different world view and a new self to inhabit it. I was aided by Indian friends, Parsi, Muslim, and Hindu who, themselves, were rich embodiments of their communities' cultural and religious traditions. Love conquers all, and I came to love our hundred-year-old villa, each of our eight servants, my students: both the boys at Hyderabad Public School and the girls at St. Francis Women's College. I loved the ancient banyan trees, the Gul Mohor, and Neem and the wealth of bird life that flocked and sang. I had time to read and write. I discovered Joseph Campbell whose explanations of the Hindu temple sculptures, and the life force behind the multiplicity of gods and goddesses suggested parallels to the Greek and Roman pantheon. A world of undiscovered mythology lay before me. My husband's position as director of a research library in American Studies gave us opportunity to travel and visit member academic institutions and scholars countrywide. There was no going back to a provincial world view nor ever to accept one religion's version of things.

After three years we reluctantly returned to Utah where sometimes greeting old friends, they would say innocently, "We haven't seen you in a while," not realizing we were not at all the same people who had left. I began a seven-year stint teaching British and World Literature, Art History as well as Creative Writing at Rowland Hall-St. Mark's School. As an enhancement to my interest in human history, I was led by the headmaster, Bill Purdy, to the works of Loren Eiseley. A paleo-biologist, a scientist and humanist, Eiseley in his many books conveys an earth historian's cosmic sense of time. After reading The Immense Journey or the Firmament of Time, I could relish the local topography, the ancient sand dunes pressed into stone, fossils and shells found in badlands once ancient seas, present and ambient. Trips with students to "read the landscape" allowed me to cherish our local environment and accept my own ephemeral place in the whirling and changing universe.

Ten years after our first "at home" in Hyderabad, India, we returned for another three years, this time with children who were in high school and college. Another one hundred-year-old villa, even more age-old trees and birds, some of the same--now older--servants and a joyous reunion with dear friends made it a true homecoming. We absorbed the Indo-Saracenic mosques, the massive f rts and ancient temples with wiser eyes and learned to accept the mysteries of a complex culture instead of settling for easy answers. A five thousand-year-old civilization has accretions, sediments, and fossils much like the diverse rock formations of Utah.

And now, partake of some mysteries. We watched with growing wonder the process by which a stone mile-marker beside the 16th century structure the Char Minar (four towers) in the center of the thronging bazaars of the Old City was, little by little, transformed into a holy shrine. The mile marker, a simple, oblong, granite upright, did resemble a Shiva-lingam, the male phallus, the creative force in Hindu mythology. Someone coming out of the nearby fever hospital carrying a wilting garland of flowers may have draped them over the stone. Another person passing by may have taken the discarded flowers as a ritual offering to Shiva. In the three years that we observed, a Hindu priest took up residence beside the stone to receive offerings and dispense blessings. Before long a miniature temple was being erected to house the "shrine." encroaching on the Muslim monument and clogging street traffic. While we had watched, a holy site was born.

Then three separate events transpired that became linked in my mind. On a trip to the great Meenakshi temple complex at Madurai, we we taken to a cave-like shrine in a hill where, during a special religious festival, devotees were lined up to pay obeisance to a white temple elephant and receive his blessings. Moved to the front of the line as visiting dignitaries, we were presented to the priests. The expectation was that we would step forward and receive a benediction from the elephant, a huge beast capable of killing with one blow. There was some hesitation and embarrassment, so I stepped forward. I bent my head, and as the elephant fixed my eyes with his, he gently lowered his trunk to rest on my head. The communion with another living creature, and the "peace that passes understanding" surged between us.

Some time later another greeting was given to me when a shadow passed my French door screen. I rose from my needlepoint work to see if a rat were trying to gain entry. I found myself face to face with a giant cobra, erect and unwavering, whose stare stopped my breath until I was finally able to scream for my son and the gardener. They ran in time to see him retreat behind the verandah palms and vanish into the stonework of the house foundation. A cobra bite means almost instant death. I was stunned with the potential of his visit. But there was a different response from my servants. They were eager to fall at my feet and touch me in veneration of one so honored as to be chosen for a visit from the god Shiva in the form of a snake. The snake is both the embodiment of creation and destruction since he carries within his body the power of death through venom. Moreover, he gains renewal or immortality through shedding his skin and thus being born afresh. I accepted, and shared, their gestures of wonderment.

After the beautiful six-year-old only son of our widowed maid servant died from the bite of a rabid dog--to our horror knocked down and attacked as we watched in our own compound--I saw the world through the eyes of Ahab, understood the ravaging indifference of the cosmos that we call cold evil. That young death tainted my optimism.

Later, when out of deep compassion for the grief of his mother, I took great care of her during a difficult and hard-to-diagnose illness, involving many trips to different doctors, labs, and, finally, ultrasound and an emergency operation that saved her life. She remained grateful for what we had done. Much later when she had regained her health, I made a rare visit to her room in the servants' quarters. I admired her domestic shrine: a calendar-art picture of Shiva over a rough table where she could light incense and place fruit and sweets as puja offerings to her deity. Next to Shiva, she had hung my photograph! To my astonishment, I had become a goddess myself, joining the Hindu pantheon of 333,333 gods and goddesses.

Since It had become so easy to attain the reverence of others--even achieving a pseudo-divinity, my longtime conviction was strengthened that being truly human embodies all that there is of the divine.

As a postscript, I should mention the twelve years I had teaching the gifted Brighton high school students in Advanced Placement English. Offered to the top ten per cent of the graduating seniors, this course in world literature and composition was designed to give them a year's equivalent credit for a college level class. The epics, plays, novels and poetry we read made indelible, and living, those characters and situations that inhabit the classics. Every year we read the third millennium B.C. Sumerian epic Gilgamesh. In this tale, after many heroic adventures with his companion at arms, Enkidu, Gilgamesh is distraught when his friend dies. He can not sleep, fears death, and in a wild and despairing state roves the world looking for immortality. Nearly at the end of the world, having subdued lions and braving the dark mountain passes, he comes upon Siduri the wine maker for the gods. She says, "Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill you belly with good things day and night night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this is the lot of man."

Are these not the basic human values? From nearly five thousand years ago comes this insight. Human focus should be on love of family, simple pleasures, and the joy of life itself. To seek beyond this world is to chase the wind. Since Siduri is the winemaker to the gods, in vino veritas, in wine is truth.

Another moment that is particularly appropriate in these times is a scene from Virgil's epic, the Aeneid. Having escaped with a band of followers from the ravages of the Trojan war where his city burned around him , having suffered there the loss of his wife, and weary with travels to establish a new Troy, grieving the recent death of his father, Aeneas lands on the shores of North Africa. Exploring inland, he finds people building a city, their first completed construction, a temple. On its walls is a sculpted relief telling the tragic story of the fall of Troy, the slaughter and suffering, but also the heroic deeds. Aeneas concludes upon seeing this tribute that he has come upon a people who understand lacrimae rerum, the tears of things, the sadness of the human condition. He feels it would be safe to seek aid from people who through their art show compassion and empathy. Encouraged, he moves to to appeal for sanctuary and assistance from Dido, queen of Carthage, herself a refugee from Phoenicia. Our country has recently understood the tears of things. We are moving toward shared compassion.

A poem which all my students memorized is a carpe diem poem by Ezra Pound which affirms love and beauty even in the face of loss.