culture

Art And Spirituality

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Last column I wrote about how my experiments with art parodying spiritual bullshit and grifty scams had been intriguing.  I understood how art was part of human spirituality,  how it our love of beauty and form and such was a way to powerfully communicate deep experiences.  This made me realize it was time to explore something I’ve been trying to put into words about art and spirituality – my parodic work helped me talk serious stuff, go figure.

Simply put, I think art is inseparable from spirituality as art is the bridge that connects us to the Universe, the Tao, The Big Picture, because it connects to our thoughts and emotions.

The universe is vast and complex, our world is complex, our lives complex – even one person is complex. We’re here trying to understand reality, move within it, live within it – but it’s so big. This is why I like the term “The Tao,” which is essentially “the source of all this and no we can’t really speak of it.”

I’m honest on my biases. But let me go on.

Now we humans, we may be small, but we are aware of how huge everything is. We model the universe, we understand it, we analyze it. To work with it, with each other, to survive, grow, explore, or even just goof off, we have to find ways to handle this great Giant Allness. Philosophy and religion and spirituality are ways to organize and naviate this world and live inside it. Obviously some philosophies and religions don’t work out that well, but you get the idea – a bad plan is still a plan.

How do you connect us to our philosophies and meditations and spells and the greater universe? Well, humans have art. Art is where thought and emotion and sensation all come together, where a single picture or image can lead us to the bigness out there. Art is connection

Art is the bridge between us and The Big Picture, the way we line everything up to really think and feel and experience the greater world. From lovely philosophical writings to complex spiritual charts, awe-inspiring gods and gorgeous meditation hangings, those symmetries and poetries help us connect.  Those synergies of emotion and word and sensation come together and we get something larger than us in a way we can handle.

Art both focuses us and helps us get bigger.

In fact, isn’t most of religion and spirituality really art in the end? Temples and diagrams, pithy advice books and statues of the gods? It’s trying to synthesize infinity and vastness in some way you can work with it, get it, think it, and feel it.

The vast powers of the world are easily understood and appreciated and interacted with in the form of a god. You want to understand the states of existence, but the diagram of the Six Realms makes it easier (and hey, six is a manageable number). We drape art over the universe to make it both comprehensible – and to take us soaring into realms greater than ourselves.

Art, that love of form and color and combination, is the perfect tool to connect us to the universe in all its vast living potential.

I think I managed to sum up my feelings. I’m sure I’ll have more to say, but at least I said it – dare I say, made some art of it.

-Xenofact

Musings On The Lonely Men Who Hate Each Other

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The “Male Loneliness Epidemic” is something I see discussed a lot. Men feel lonely and isolated. Men fall under the spell of grifters. Men don’t find what they need and get bitter and angry. Being a pretty generic guy, I take interest in this for many reasons, including the fact a lot of (white) guys voted for Donald Trump who, as of this post, is sort of ruining everything.

Having lived many, many decades I get the concern about male loneliness. I also however was raised with the idea that you can find and make friends. I suspect some of this is really that I hit a sweet spot of how I was raised, role models, connective nerd culture, and region. I grew up thinking about making friends and connecting, and that it’s my job to do it. I guess some people missed that.

Beyond my very broad experiences, I’m not sure I can comment on the fine details of this supposed epidemic, if it is an epidemic (I don’t think so), and so on. I think what is obvious is there’s a grifty, fascistic part of Online Male Culture that uses this sense of disconnection to give vulnerable men a pathological and unsustainable role model, what one person on Tumblr called wittily the Buff Scammer.

The Buff Scammer is a sort of capitalistic/fascistic/comic book ideal of a guy as a jacked hustler always making scores and gains. You don’t actually enjoy yourself, you just have to keep up the gains and the money to show off . . . to other men. Even relations with women are ways to show off to men, meaning that you enter into the bizarrely homoerotic sphere of men thinking of men in their wooing of women. These men don’t have friends or lovers, just targets of various kinds.

What is funny is that, with my (ever-advancing age) and interest in history is I’m used to seeing far different ideals of male role models that are not the Buff Scammer.. A lot of them involved an idea of citizenship in many ways, even if there were other pathologies. The idea of a man was an idea of being engaged and part of things (even if there was plenty of toxic masculinity otherwise). It’s weird to see that in, say, 2500 year old writings, but also remember it in my youth and feel like it’s sort of been pushed aside in my lifetime.

Citizenship gives one some grounding, some sense of place – and you feel less lonely. You’re playing or seeking to play a role. Maybe it’s just me getting old, but I honestly see that completely lacking in large parts of culture, including some of the male grift-o-sphere. I meet plenty of engaged citizens who are happy, but there are zones where the idea of citizenship seems long gone.

Citizenship as an ideal leads you to not be alone and to seek connection. You have an ideal of belonging. The Buff Scammer and his ilk have none of that. That has to not just be lonely, but it resists a traditional gateway for not being lonely – the idea of being an active citizen. I mean you may not like everyone but you’re part of something.

This makes me think of the events of the first few months of the Trump administration. Trump destroyed alliances and trade deals built over decades – indeed over a century. He isolated the country in a temper tantrum, trying to look tough. He was, in short, a Buff Scammer (well, not that Buff) who has no concept of friends, of citizenship.

And then I think of the lonely men who voted for him. They have no concept of friends either. No concept of citizenship. No concept of belonging.

It’s just lonely people in a temper tantrum, disconnected, isolated, and running things, leaving them even more alone. Citizenship may be a solution, but people will have to learn to be active about it. Certainly they just found some grifter is going to make them more lonely.

-Xenofact

Art In Active Suspension

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In 2025 I have been vitally interested in the role of art in social evolution and opposing authoritarianism for the obvious reason that America made some bad decisions it quickly regretted.

Anyway, art is powerful. It’s a combination of words, symbols, colors, lyrics, music, or whatever that gets into your head. Good art is both its own little ecosystem but also is something your mind and feelings latch onto – the goal of good art is to be effective. Art is a tiny world that so connects with your mind it changes you..

When art changes you and others the world can change – and change for the better. Look how it can build social cohesion with shared symbols as well as undermine systems of control, gnawing away at oppressors. Art can inspire people to do even more art, creating a cascade of ideas no tyrant can stem both by sheer power and because most tyrants have the artist sense of blacktop.

Just take a look at history. The Orange Men, anti-fascist songs, pamphleteers, insulting songs, sarcastic essays, mocking plays. You even start wondering about non-political art – perhaps seemingly innocent creations were just subtle assaults on The System. How many revolutionary ideas have we just not noticed yet? How many changed us and we didn’t realize it?

How many ideas in art were not noticed by those who were their target until it was too late?

And that’s just art. Art-adjacent things like religion and spirituality and science also use art to change minds and inform. Look at meditation diagrams and deep symbolic representations. Look at gorgeous art from old science textbooks, drilling that knowledge into your head. Art is powerful.

These days, I think we need more revolutionary art. But in contemplating this I had a rather chilling thought.

What is art as I write about it in 2025? There’s so many ways to publish and print and record, yes, but we’re encouraged endlessly to turn it to profit. We’re asked to make art that fits what sells, that can be marketed, that can fit into certain formats and so on. The overall “art mindset” of our culture is one of making things that we can sell, and that helps bring money to the assorted services and vendors we have.

Now I’m all for people making money, but having seen obsessive attempts by people trying to find the right niche, sell the right story, I wonder. How much effort to make art goes into trying to make the “right” art? How much of our artistry is just understanding how to sell something we’re not quite as enthused about making?

There’s so much product that doesn’t feel like art.

How much of our art today is just contentmade to fit marketing specs and bring in money, not change the world. How many potential revolutionaries are making another tired novel, another just-the-same painting, another knock-off game? How many revolutions could happen that aren’t not because of oppression, but just our endless grind in pursuit of profit.

No, I’m not saying Capitalism is a deliberate attempt to crush art. I’m just noting it’s got some anti-art systems built in. Don’t even start me on so-called “AI.”

There are a lot of future revolutionaries out there, art-wise – as well as just plain good artists. I get the need to make a buck, but maybe that’s restraining them from what they can be. I wonder how we can help them because we need them – and always have.

-Xenofact