1641, what will become the prison
begins in Europe in the mind of Descartes.
"Cogito, ergo sum."
"In regarding the New World and its peoples,
the European man is thrown into crisis.
All he thought he knew of humanness
is destabilized at the sight of the Black and Indigenous
body, its physicality.
Surely, they aren't also human.
Surely, I am not like them.
And so he turns inward to make sense of the world.
He rebuilds reality from the anchor of the thought.
And in thinking himself, radically
separates mind from body into dual natures--
angel and animal, pure soul and bestial body.
This is the birth of the white imaginary,
the construction of white identity central
to Western consciousness and its dualism of reason over nature.
Reason alone makes us men and distinguishes us
from the beasts.
The thinking European man as fundamentally different
from unthinking nature.
No longer bound to a collective consciousness,
reason places man above nature.
And just as mind controls body, so
does man control the physical world
and the nature-bound body of unmapped terrain,
a slight metaphysical shift that forms the worldwide structure
of oppression.
And in so doing, produces the consciousness
that will rupture the world.
Forgive me these abstractions, I'm
speaking from the end of this timeline.
I'm looking for the origin of the world
wound, the seismic shift and consciousness
that estranged us from each other,
and continues to produce this present,
the prison, the border.
I'm speaking from the burning rainforest, the rising ocean,
the atrocities of our dying future.
To locate the site of rupture, I must investigate
the scene of the crime.
Europe, the origin of a consciousness that cannot
imagine a world without prison, police supremacy.
The radical separation of mind from body
fundamentally remakes reality.
Mind over matter is serious business,
a dualism that will entrench colonial logic
into the sciences, just as they are developing and documenting
the life and matter of the universe, imagined
through masculine reason over the animalistic, feminized,
nature-bound body.
Reason over nature produces the supremacy
of the European man in contrast to the irrational colonial
subject.
The axis of difference upon which the new world is built,
mapped, peopled, labored, gendered, fertile coasts,
virgin territories, vulnerable to ships
sailing the Cartesian plane across the world,
splitting in two.
Reason dismantled our collective conscience and shared knowledge
systems.
When man encounters the unknown, all difference
is made irrational to make man coherent, obliterating
the colossal mystery of our planet, reduced
to a dim blue seed.
His divine intelligence defined against the irrational animal
will go on to invent race, himself,
the angel above the brute, the monster, the savage,
the prisoner, the slave.
Diminishing complex eco-spiritual agriculture,
advanced astronomical navigation,
to the limits of his perception.
Intricate social systems of kinship
lost to skeptical simplistic binaries, a reality structured
by antagonism, empirical evidence, the burden of proof.
Science and law will produce the animal body
as suspect, criminal, fugitive alongside the prison.
Reason is the domain of empire, its function
to set man's gaze on the horizon of expansion,
that in preserving itself, criminalizes the world.
Another seismic shift, in reorienting the world and man,
difference becomes permanent.
Blackness, the savage, the heathen, the feminine,
the base, the queer, the contagion, reason
produces the condition of difference as inherent.
The other is always not him.
For the European man to exist, he must always
be defined against difference.
Every encounter and estrangement reminding each of the war.
The other never satisfying the gaze that unmakes the world.
From the same mind, "cogito, ergo sum,"
as point of origin on a cross, xy-axis that go on infinitely.
This is not a neutral geometry.
On the Cartesian plane, empire thinks itself
into existence as the center of an infinite expansion.
Dual hemispheres of unequal power, mapping reality
as property, as capital, as resource,
as inheritance for the European man,
a crown infinitely possible in any direction.
Inextricable-- human from European,
knowledge from colony, science from race.
Benefactor of empire, what hubris to shift consciousness
from world to self, to shift truth
from belonging to the world to the European man alone?
Himself, the judge, and all else subject to judgment.
Power is the insistence of what one believes
to become everyone's truth.
And so this reality was mapped onto the Cartesian plane
along axes of difference.
A man doesn't evolve to reason.
Reason imagines difference to create
man a superior, tearing reality in two
to build an empire of fear, always requiring subjugation
to produce the self, borders to produce
space, gender to produce labor.
A consciousness built on fear that
makes a world in which we are ever more not like each other.
And in so doing, makes all the world a cell."