Federico Campagna

“The empty dishes on the kitchen table. A glass over the corner of a napkin. The liquid at its bottom, vibrating at the rhythm of my drumming.
There it was, in all its splendour: Reality. All the mysteries and any possible revelation were in that domestic glass, sleeping under a veil. Every possible adventure, already taking place at the point where a gaze encounters an object, or a mind a thought.
I looked at the shadow-lines that the table lamp cast on the napkin and followed their trajectory beyond their mark. I looked at the reflections on the glass and slid the back of my hand against its cold body. I wondered if it might feel me, the same as I felt it. If it was staring at me and receiving as silent an answer as the one I got from it.
Maybe I was doing it wrong. I should have proceeded with order: cataloguing what I could see and all its qualities, while looking for a gap where my reason could break in. Or maybe I should have done the opposite: becoming pure awareness, staring at my surroundings devoid of any intentions, with the clear eye of a hanging mirror.
The cigarette embers licked my fingers and I put it out in the ashtray. I had done that countless times already: looking and looking and finding nothing else than what I knew. I was surrounded by a library, encased within each speck of space and time, and yet I was blind to its words. I felt tired. The glass was still there. I closed my eyes to look for the image of it that I had impressed in my memory. I found it. I lost it. I found it again, and soon it faded. I stretched my legs under the table and I rested my head on the palm of my hands. The glass was still there in my memory. I found it. I lost it. I looked again.”
― Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents