The Mystery of Passion

Maya Pontillo is a researcher, curator, and writer interested in interpreting and synthesizing spiritual thought, ancient doctrines, art, and new media, listening for the subtle ways the sacred makes itself felt as old knowledge learns new languages.

The Mystery of Passion is a meditative commentary on gravity, eros, and the body as a spiritual instrument. Drawing from Bataille, mysticism, and lived experience, it frames passion as a disciplined intimacy with the forces that shape us.

You do not descend into Madness, you ascend to meet it.

Ideas are constantly copulating, like dragonflies, their sex becomes creative entanglement and in a perpendicular line, we exist, and our body is a window to the outside, the material. 

Our relationship with Gravity is the first fiery renouncement of true choice; it is our submissive nature to have this weight. 

Promise me this: God is dead, and we are one. 

Every day when I wake up, I get on my knees, I dance, I move my hands, and so, I pray. 

There is a hyperphysical extravagance to our experience, the work of Ann Udenberg is one of the greatest mirrors of our time. Extravagance of materials, extravagance of sounds, her shapes are the most natural a body can look under the scrutiny of this orgy of stimuli.  

Materialism has alienated human beings from the world of the dead and the invisible, to accept that everything lives at a sacred distance that nothing is truly close nor distant, is the truth of the mystical erotic. It is not a matter of existence, but a matter of experience. 

To simply approach the so-called outside by being, is erotic living. 

But what is being? 

Any kind of body is an experience tied to it through these forces and what numbers have failed to express, is our intimate relationship to them. 

Bondage is only but an image of our profound and invisible relationship with Gravity. 

Before modern law told us what movement is, and how movement is performed, our natural sovereignty already knew it. 

The opening of the spiritual sensorium is the mystery of the New experience. 

By mystery, we can say: knowledge which is veiled, and that veil is purposeful. But the Mystery is not a fact, it is not a number, it is not a word. The Mystery is to experience.

What is Unity? To dissolve, into art, into an idea, into another body, into a journey. That’s what Bataille spoke so intensely about, death is truly the only thing that can offer a truly unified experience. 

To approach the material pushed through Gravity as our greatest dominator, with Passion.

We have to make Gravity and Passion make love. With the purpose of creative living. 

There are many frontiers, and every mystical experience is inherently erotic devotion. 

I had a dream where I met with someone I liked, and I told him that I felt that his body had a specific kind of gravity that pulled me towards him but an atmosphere that intoxicated me.

To be devoted to faith or to be devoted to a shape. Faith demands a shape, and it will take any. 

The erotic is the frontier and mystical experience is inherently erotic devotion to a great symphonic stream.