The food processor is not one of the spirals Antonio Ochoa refers to in his Small Sargasso Mountains. The spiral that rises from a plume of smoke is in the book, though. The spiral at the heart of Archimedes’ Screw is not in the book. The spiral exhibited by oil that’s spilled into the ocean is. The spiral you might see in the previews for Wide Sargasso Sea is present, but mainly by suggestion.
If you can relax into a state of mind that moves like a spiral, and coalesces like spirals, you’ll be in the right headspace for reading Ochoa’s book. Because he’s prepared to observe the spiral underlying every possible circumstance. Notoriously visible spirals, like a seashell. And deeply intuitive ones, like the relationship drawn in his mind when he’s moving between English and Spanish. And while the spiral typically exists in this mental, incidental space for the book, it might be more helpful to parallel Ochoa’s spiral thinking with the unartful, plain-to-the-imagination food processor blade. Because the blade is active and consistent. It does simple work to food at the bottom of a plastic container, processing it from solid into a viscous consistency. Which is what spiral logic feels like in Small Sargasso Mountains. Logic exists as a linear subsistence. An anticipated ending. And the spiral may or may not end.
And yet either forms of logic have an allure. The attractive, implicit truth revealed by the syllogism highlights a systematic connectivity. Its linear momentum has a compelling ease, a guiding light. I’m not a formal logician, but I know its pleasures when I see it (I think). But, as Ochoa makes clear, the mind knows other relationships bind ideas. Intuition cannot be a series of straight lines alone.
And this is the wonder in Ochoa’s book. He opens with a proposition of spirals. A mythology of them. An ease with connecting parts of his life and the world. Perhaps there is even a science to spirals. Has there been a scientific study that describes the spiral vibrations of a cat floating to the upper edges of the atmosphere, then settling on a cat’s skin, informing them of other cats in the area? I’m not sure. But as an Antonio Ochoa poem it’s wonderful and softly coding a logic that should be true, even when it’s not necessarily altogether true. For Ochoa the spiral is most recognizable in dreams (which explicitly appear at different points of the book). But he’s aware of the spirals natural existence.
And, most importantly, he’s aware the book need not force the issue in order for the spiral’s truth to exist as a growing crescendo of logicness (with s’s added to the -ness to emphasize how much like logic they are, how assuredly logical they feel). Ochoa’s book settles into my mind like a book whose project is to consider spirals as a significant explanation of reality. But I don’t read each page anticipating the appearance of the spiral. Small Sargasso Mountains’s project is not to land on the spiral. The project is to reveal and think about why they might mean so much. It’s like the Sargasso Sea, whose growth from feeding on human sewage might raise it to the status of hyperobject, expanding it past the human mind’s capacity to understand its implications as a whole. But whose seaweed would still move in a fluctuation of spirals. What does that mean? Because if there’s a meaning to that, Ochoa might nail down whatever the spiral means.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.