Dead on Arrival: The Fate of Nature in the Scientific Revolution

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

David Kubrin is this wonderful historical alchemist I met thanks to my involvement 
with Reclaiming. I was in the holding area at Santa Rita Jail over near Livermore
---arrested in a mass [1000] planned protest at Livermore Labs, where our modern 
versions of Agdy call down thunder, and spent a long time hanging with and talking 
to David Kubrin. The concepts found in this typically excellent article can also be 
found in his historical spade-work for Starhawk's "Dreaming the Dark". Kubrin's 
writings provide great background on the Alchemist themes in Pynchon, and his 
"take" on the spiritual politics of the Reformation is like a hidden map to 
Mason & Dixon:

          On several occasions — all left unpublished — Newton 
          testified that nature everywhere seemed alive. Thus Sir 
          Isaac Newton’s system of the world, his ideas on movement, 
          light, forces, matter, mathematics, and methods of doing 
          science, was really a carefully crafted negotiation of the 
          allowable spaces reality could occupy, a largely hidden 
          dialectic played back and forth between inner and outer 
          layers of the doctrines in which he believed.

          And the Newton seeking the principles that led to activity 
          in the cosmos, who wondered how the motion inevitably 
          lost, due to irregularities in the interactions of bodies, 
          might be restored to the cosmos, who realized that the 
          world could never be simply a blind mechanism, the 
          Newton whose theories were rooted in a magical 
          conception of the cosmos — this Newton was denied to 
          the world for centuries, partially emerging only in recent 
          decades. The Newton who bequeathed us a machine 
          universe was simply too important an icon hanging, as 
          it were, on the gateposts to modernity to be in the least 
          way questioned. But Newton himself chose this understanding 
          of his vision to be the one revealed to the public, sharing his 
          less orthodox views only with the dozen or so young disciples 
          he used to fight for his ideas.

          David Kubrin is the author of "Marxism & Witchcraft," a treatise 
          on the ecological crisis from which this essay is adapted. He 
          has a doctorate in the history of science, is a middle-school 
          teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District, and has 
          been a longtime political activist. This article originally appeared 
          in reclaiming Quarterly magazine, www.reclaiming.org

http://www.culturechange.org/issue20/deadonarrival.htm
http://www.vurdalak.com/tunguska/witness/chunya_tribe.htm
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/99108.html