it must be so

It's the rare thing that lasts 30 seconds while also never ending inside your head. A sideways space has been opened to become a volume of the inexplicable. And within that space, something not exactly real weaves around itself a palpable web of the truer-real. 

In my arrogant opinion, coming across genuine contemporary surrealism is something that verges on the impossible. These days, you observe painters, writers, theater directors, and filmmakers trying too damn hard to be surreal. It's cloying, and it pisses me off. Surrealism flowing with the natural-unnatural is rare and beyond the pale. 

Yet four years ago, my first encounter with author Kris Saknussemm was in the form of 57 words lasting 30 seconds (which also never ends for me). That written eruption gives the true masters of surrealism from back in the day a tight run for the money. There's a quality of strange beauty and a quality of spiritual it-must-be-so about it. For a Westerner, only China could be the endless aesthetic of the sideways sublime. The symbolic of a regular dream finds itself shanghaied into the awesomeness of a hyper-dream.

Here it is:

Watching the old men betting on a cricket fight in Guangzhou. Two female students I knew float by in an enormous tea cup, the kind with the dragons on it that change color when you pour in the hot water. It looks strangely innocent in the sludge of the Pearl River amongst the barges and industrial boats.