From Small Sargasso Mountains (3 & 4) by Antonio Ochoa
"In a spiral reading, there is no usefulness."
From Small Sargasso Mountains (3 & 4) by Antonio Ochoa (3) Intuition is a form of knowledge. It took me a long time to unlearn the academic modes of reading. I live closer to the way Kafka describes it: the blows of the ax that open spaces to flow in and out of. Intuition is different from instinct, although they are close. Intuition implies imagination and a certain type of reasoning. Instinct does not. In an intuitive spiral reading, opacity is endured with the primordial impulses of a work and its interconnections with others, because what drives it is not only intellectual understanding. A spiral reading flows openly. It irradiates: a galaxy in sustained expansion. In a spiral reading, there is no usefulness. Usefulness reduces a text to information. And there’s a solid link between information and control. For me the point is the encounter: transient, open-ended assemblages made by individual and concrete things: Nicanor Parra, Aunt Hester’s Scream, the neighbor’s hands working on her garden. (4) January 4th, 2024 I dreamed that I was falling backwards naked on my bed. The mattress was very soft, but it was wrapped in a coarse burlap cloth. I sank into it and couldn’t get up. A huge nocturnal butterfly floated above me. In its bulbous black eyes, I saw the reflection of my own panic. Bit by bit, my eyes relaxed, my forehead unwrinkled, and my lips formed a little smile. Its wings didn’t beat. When I looked at them closer, I realized that the scales of its wings were hundreds of thousands of miniscule human skulls rotating in different directions at dizzying speeds. When it finally beat its wings, it went up through the ceiling and disappeared. As it passed through, skulls fell like dust all over me. As they landed on my skin, they kept spinning, each skull finding a pore through which to enter to merge with the marrow of my bones.
SMALL SARGASSO MOUNTAINS / PEQUEÑAS CORDILLERAS DE SARGAZO (NIGHTBOAT, 2026)