Symbiosis and sacrament, transcendence and traction, and thus Anna Akhmatova: It’s as though the connection was predatory, the photograph-those three faces-just waiting for its prey to wander within striking distance, unawares. Powers’ chance encounter with Sander’s photograph gave him his calling-an ambush of sympathy and awareness, his world focusing on one utterly compelling thing. Those three young German men, headed to a dance and soon afterwards to the “Great War”: glancing back at the camera, their lives and deaths before them, pulling Powers into his future. This was Powers’ epiphany the following week he quit his technical editing job in Boston and began writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance twelve more novels have followed, along with a MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize.
I felt the shock of recognizing a thing I knew I had never seen before.” They’d waited two-thirds of a century for me to swing into view, just past the photographer’s shoulder. I stood face to faces with three young men who were scrutinizing me. That room’s geometry has fused to the floor plan of my brain.
It’s been a fortuitous read for me, because partway through I found this description of Powers’ encounter with August Sander’s 1914 photograph, “Three Farmers on Their Way to Dance”: “First image on the left-hand wall, just inside the door. Love and obsession, it seems, are only a bush-bash, third-class scramble, or steep and trailless mountain pass away.Īlong with the equipment necessary for salamandering, I’ve also carried Galatea 2.2 into the Inyos-Richard Powers’ autobiographical take on love, artificial intelligence, and consciousness. Why is it that we love the things that we love? And why is it that we sometimes recognize them immediately, as they call out to us with such insistence and power? What’s the alchemy? I’ve struggled with these questions for much of my adult life and this spring I’ve been hauling them around the Inyo Mountains, along with my calipers, spring scale, GPS, and 1.5 ml vials of ethanol – those tiny repositories for Inyo Mountains salamander tail-tips and so much more.