Transcendental Memes

Imagine internet memes as artefacts, knots on the thread of time that inflict the same changes on the course of humanity’s history as the Renaissance and Roaring Twenties did. This, let’s be honest, cannot be said about all of the memes. The majority of them become obsolete in a matter of days or weeks – what we lol and rofl about today loses its charm tomorrow, leaving no knot on the thread. For a second, imagine the opposite will happen. Imagine how some of the memes will survive and become subjects of study for future researchers specialising in the culture or the absence of it at the beginning of the 21st century.

Felix and Felicia Futzbucker, a family of two aspiring memologists, during a long and tiresome research phase for some future equivalent of PhD thesis, rummage the ancient internet archives and dusty Wikipedia pages in desperate attempts to find memeartefacts, memes that might be pivotal for their own worldview and the understanding of our society and our pursuits towards excellence or degeneration. Dwelling in the hyperrealm, the future non-cringy equivalent of the metaverse1, the memologists waggle their fingers through virtual yet tangible piles of files, like Oscar Peterson2 playing C Jam Blues, or an octopus crawling over one of the Mediterranean sandy beaches towards the Mediterranean sea, and then, in the YouTube section, serendipity clichésquely reveals to them one virtual burnt page caged into a virtual plastic file. The file oozes light like a beacon amidst the endless ocean of content, other quadribillimillithousands of pages already obscured and forsaken. An acid yellow halo highlights the file, just like quest items in World of Warcraft3, and the memologists, two small virtual human avatars among the endlessness of infinitely tall shelving units of the hexagonal halls of the hyperlibrary, notice it, shiny and alluring. They approach the file, insert their virtual fingers between the multiplicity of pages, and touch upon omniwisdom for which only deities of knowledge have a right. The file quivers in their hands, stings the very tips of their fingers like an electrified piece of synthetic cloth, and their palms become slightly numb. The name on the file divinely proclaims Идущий к реке4.

“For Pepe's sake, what are these letters?” asks Felix.

“These are Cyrillic letters I suppose”, Felicia answers.

“And what do they say?” asks Felix.

“I don't know, let's translate,” Felicia answers, “we have fabulous AI translators here in the future, don't we?”

After a couple of mindclicks and a bunch of microseconds5, they discover that the file is in one of the ancient languages widespread in Eurasia and the title vaguely translates as One Who Walks Towards The River.

“Sounds like a good name for an ancient Oriental parable,” says Felix.

“It does, Felicia agrees. Or a post-rock band, were they a thing in the 21st century?” adds Felicia.

“I bet they were,” says Felix.

Thus Felicia Futzbucker and Felix Futzbucker unfold the file and their familiar world flips. Forever.

However, before their personal cosmos is bent, broken, disintegrated and assembled back, we must state for the sake of storytelling who Felix and Felicia are. They are memologists, we know that already, but they aren’t memologists in a sense you perhaps imagine them to be. See, memology is a science that subsumes many scientific subjects. Memology is not only about classic memes. Everybody knows classics, Felix and Felicia aren’t an exception. Neither is memology only about funny trending pictures. This is of course also a subject of memology as science but Felix and Felicia aren’t seeking memes able to spark a kek and immerse you in a temporary pleasant physical state consisting of rhythmical, often audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system. They are desperate in fathoming their virtual lives and their only hope is memes. Yes, they have the hyperrealm6, but you see, they’ve reached the level when choices, options, information, and experiences aren’t prone to physical limitations anymore. Everything and anything can exist in the hyperrealm, all of the time. Imagine, you bask in the abundance of abundant abundances7. Robots do everything for you: finance robots earn you money, artistic robots make you Art, arse-wiping robots wipe your arse, sex robots engage with you into carnal pleasures and deliver you orgasms, including virtual, travel robots routinely transport you to any places, real, i.e. simulated, and engineered (also by robots), i.e. generated, dream robots enchant you with blissful visions or nightmares if desired, and so forth. You watch it all like an ancient pharaoh watching their servants and ask yourself, who are you in this hyperheaven? Hence Felix and Felicia’s only hustle is to look for meaning. What meaning? you’d ask. I don’t know, I’d answer. That’s the thing with meaning, I’d add.

Felix and Felicia have a hypothesis that some memes are more than just memes. Under their quirky shell lurks a depressing shite. Funny pictures masking terrifying situations. The cheering tip of the fatalistic iceberg. For Felix and Felicia, One Who Walks Towards The River unveils itself from exactly that angle. To study the meme and prove their hypothesis as true scientists do, they decide to experience it, feel it, touch it, sense it, absorb it, behold it firsthand, comprehend it, transfix to its deepest nuances, let it pierce their bodies and consciousnesses with its memeoactive emanations. All of that you can only do in the hyperrealm’s memereserve.

The memologists enter the dome. The reasonable question occurs to the reader, i.e. you, what is “the dome” and what is “the memereserve”? See, every meme in the future has a separate dome in the hyperrealm to preserve the meme in its pristine state. Imagine it as a conservation centre but on an island floating in space amidst the utter void of nothingness. Under the dome, all is stagnant, predetermined, and follows a script written by the hyperrealm demiurges8. Every meme is like a character of The Truman Show. It surrenders itself to the algoflow and exists through its fate humbly, with no urges to explore the world outside of the dome. The meme is quarantined in this memereserve, a sanctuary where the memologists can scrutinise it and experience it as many times as they need, safely.

So, the memologists enter the dome. An 8-bit version of Bo Burnham's Welcome To The Internet starts playing. They see a vastness of a green-yellow field, the solemn sky with curvy clouds, the setting sun, distant deciduous trees, and a lone man, with short hair, a blue plaid shirt, a metaphysical sigil of tranquillity above him. He is fit, his back is straight, his gait confident, his eyes focused. In front of his face, the man holds a rectangular piece of technology, a device ancient people called a smartphone9. Felix and Felicia have no idea what he’s doing and they walk closer to the man to check. Instead of Bo Burnham's 8-bit cover, Interstellar music starts playing, not “interstellar” interstellar music but the music from the film Interstellar. Hanz Zimmer10. Dark hypnotising organ sound vibes through the atmosphere in the whole dome and goosebumps roll over Felix and Felicia's skin. Woah. They approach him closer. The man can neither hear nor see them. He's an astral projection, just a new elucidated meme from old hallucinated life, forgotten centuries ago.

The memologists hear him talking.

“Fuck, I don't give a fuck about you, whatever fuckin’ car you got, fuckin' flats, fuckin' shit, yachts, whatever, I don't give a fuck, even fuckin’ Bentley, a fuckin' Maybach, a Rolls-Royce, a Bugatti, a hundred-foot yacht, I don't give a shit, you know? How many or what women you fuck, all those chic or satiny females, whether you're flying into fucking space, I don't give a fuck about all that, you know?” says the man as he goes through the meandering gravel road that divides the green-yellow field into two parts.

Felix and Felicia open their virtual notebooks, parts of their hyperbrains, a superstructure on top of their normal brains11, and start jotting down some thoughts. Parallel to that12, they read metadata about the meme. The man in this meme is Serj Dur-Dachnik13, a guy who lives in the countryside and enjoys long walks14, sometimes day-long walks, towards and then along the river. Zimmer's music is still playing and immerses the memologists into the same state of flow in which Serj currently15 is. Walking further, he continues his speech...

“I am so fuckin’ transcended in my cognition as if I have lived for a hundred trillion of billions of fuckin’ years on trillions of trillions of fuckin’ planets, like this Earth; this world makes perfect sense to me, and the only thing I'm looking here for is fuckin’ peace, tranquillity and that harmony from merging with the infinite-eternal, from contemplating the great fractal similarity and that wonderful wholeness of being; the infinite-eternal wherever you look: look deep down – infinitesimal, look upwards – infinitely large. See?”

Felix and Felicia start seeing it, the infinite-eternal. It’s indescribable. It’s not alluring and it’s not frightening. It’s not light and it’s not dark. It’s like a quaquaversal magnetic field emanating from everything to everything in all-piercing waves, each of which is. Yes, it simply is. The Zimmer music grows louder. The man, meanwhile, continues.

“Your horizon of knowledge and sense of your nature is incommensurably small compared to mine, understand? It's like I'm a great elder, immortal, or maybe almost immortal, who's been on this planet since its inception when the Sun just became a star, and that gas-dust cloud appeared from those coacervates, you know.”

Charmed by the insight, the memologists notice that Earth’s surface spins around the man. He keeps strolling and the dome moves with him, everything moves with him, even them. This is, however, logical. If a person gets transfixed to reality, the reality gets transfixed to the person. How could it be otherwise?

The sigil on top of the man glows in an unrecognisable colour. It beguiles Felix and Felicia but does it in the purest sense possible. Felix and Felicia speed up and get closer to the man. They overtake him and look into his face. He, however, looks at his smartphone’s camera, then to the distance, then again to his smartphone’s camera, and so on, continuing recording his revelation on video, the video that carried the meme into existence.

“I've been on this planet in the infinite set of states. somewhere I've been complete shit, even worse than here now. Somewhere I was more like a plant, somewhere I was more like a bird, a worm, or just a lump of rock – this all is Soul, you know? It has a completely diverse, infinitely large number of facets. But you can’t understand that, so you go fuck yourself.”

Felix and Felicia flinch as the man suddenly looks them in their eyes, in both their pairs of eyes at the same time, just like the Mona Lisa does. They feel a gentle breeze. They smell the road’s dust. They see the sunset glares. They sense the meaning, flaming fuss, it shivers, throbs, dissolves and mingles with their minds. The man goes on, his voice vibrates and fills the dome engaging in the blissful choir with Hanz Zimmer.

“I wish you all to have the coolest cars and all the best females spreading their slits topsy-turvy in front of you so you can fuck them till your face is reddened like this sunset, and all that being in the best yachts and planes, and so you can cum right out of the porthole, and do everything you can think of or can't think of; if you don't have enough ideas, come to me, I'll give you a hundred trillion ways to do everything against every idea you've got.”

The Zimmer orchestra comes to a crescendo. Now, Felix and Felicia levitate following the man. For a second, they can see beyond the dome: they see the Sun, the Milky Way, the galaxies far far away. A long time back and forward they see the time, the solid block of glass, a giant lens refracting lives into a rainbow ray. The music fades. They hear only Serj’s voice, it resonates, it fills their heads, both Felix’s and Felicia’s together.

“You see, that's all, that's the difference between us. You don't see the infinite-eternal, you don't need it. You are more active, so to say, like a fuckin’ chiselling woodpecker or an ant on its path looking for whatever something. I understand you perfectly but you can hardly understand me because I kind of contain you in me, you are like one little grain of sand of what I have in me, understand?”

Felix and Felicia understand. They are chiselling woodpeckers no more. They have merged with the meme and the meme has merged with them. They are a part of the infinite-eternal and all its parts at the same time. Their hyperbrain, the hyperlibrary, the hyperrealm, the hyperabundance of hyperabundantly stir-fried hyperabundances seasoned with a gentle pinch of hyperabundance fly apart like a theatre curtain, and right near the setting Sun on the horizon, they see the meaning as if it has always been there, a forsaken sleeping giant. The man’s voice leads them in wholeness and unity towards the river, and they hear his last words.

“That's all, so come on, go, move, and I'm off to enjoy a fucking beautiful autumn sunset on the bank of a warm southern river. That's it, fuck-shmak off, and I'm shmaking-fuckin' away myself.”