Article · Neptune
Neptune on the Gemini–Sagittarius Axis
Why talking about where things are going and choosing your way form one axis
Pavel Medvedev · Published: · Updated:
This is a short article. There are no stories here, just the core of an axis explored in detail in Neptune in Gemini and Neptune in Sagittarius. For an overview of all six axes, see Neptune: Eternal Contexts.
The whole we are part of
Each of us is part of something larger: music, a profession, a town, a country, the time we live in. That larger whole does not stand still. It moves: things pass away, others arrive, it is going somewhere. In every sign, Neptune concerns how this larger whole comes to life through a person’s particular participation. On the Gemini–Sagittarius axis, it concerns the movement of that whole and our place within it.
Gemini: movement lives in words
The larger whole has no voice of its own. It can speak only through us, in conversations between people. When we talk about where music is going, where the country is heading, what will happen to our profession, this is not an exchange of opinions. The whole the speakers belong to is present in the words themselves, not as an object, but as movement: where it is going. A conversation about where everything is heading is the movement of the whole made audible. In every word of such a conversation, the larger whole is on the move.
Neptune in Gemini — the movement of the larger whole we are part of, in our words.
Sagittarius: your own course within the movement
We are not just part of a movement. Each of us has a life unfolding within it: things we want to happen to us, our own road, our own encounters, our own work. Choosing that life and steering toward it, adjusting as we go, means making our own way within the current, neither drifting like a wood chip nor standing across its path. We choose a course within the movement of the whole, not in the abstract: within what is actually happening, not what has already gone.
Neptune in Sagittarius — choosing your own course within the movement of the larger whole you are part of.
Why this is one axis
You can choose your own course only if you know where the whole is heading. And you can learn that only through words: through conversations in which that movement can be heard. So Sagittarius cannot work without Gemini. Without a conversation about where things are going, there is nowhere to plot a route. Nor can Gemini work without Sagittarius: talking about the movement of the whole without anyone then taking their own road is idle chatter.
The axis is closed when both halves are present: the movement of the larger whole can be heard in our words, and each person uses what they hear to choose their own course within it. Then conversation becomes a road, and the road remains part of the whole.
Where are you going?
That question — “Quo vadis?” — is older than any of our articles. We ask the whole: where are you going? And we ask ourselves: where am I going within what moves around me and with me? The Gemini–Sagittarius axis holds both questions together. The first without the second is contemplation. The second without the first is stubbornness. Together, they make the life of someone who knows what they are part of and chooses their own way within it.
The map and the road
Why talk about large movements at all? Because our own movement depends on them.
We are moving too. Our lives are a sequence of events and directions: what happens to us, and where we take it. But none of it happens in a vacuum. It happens within events on a larger scale, which follow their own course.
So the sequence goes like this. We talk, understand, revise our picture of how the larger whole is moving. We read the map, adjust our road, adjust our course and move on. Then again: conversation, adjustment, movement. Over and over.
Travelling that road gives us something we cannot get from conversation: direct experience of the whole. We then discuss that experience with others, hear how things went for them, and adjust our way again. Conversation feeds the road; the road feeds conversation.
The simplest case is a lunch break. Everyone has gone to lunch, while we have planned something else for that time. We will run into a misunderstanding, and not because the plan is bad. But if we know when people here go to lunch, we can coordinate, and things work out better.
That is why words are a map. The movement of the whole made audible in conversation is the map. It is what lets us move and find our bearings within the whole.
What psychology calls it
Psychology calls updating a map without ever going anywhere rumination. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema showed that endlessly turning over “where is everything heading and what will happen to me?” takes us further from a solution, not closer, although from inside it looks like thinking hard. This is Gemini with Sagittarius missing: the movement of the whole is there in the words, but there is no course of one’s own.
Alfred Korzybski gave us a phrase for the map’s inevitable incompleteness: the map is not the territory. It is often repeated as a warning against maps. Here it means something else: the map is incomplete and goes out of date, but without it we cannot choose a road; without a map, travel becomes drift. Dan McAdams, writing about narrative identity, showed the same thing from a third angle: a person understands their life as a story, and that story is a course within a larger story they know something about.
Three observations from three different corners of psychology. Here, they form one axis.
What psychology does about these problems, and what the axis adds, is explored in Six Problems That Already Have a Plan.
Poems
I. Gemini
We often talk of where it all is heading,
in kitchens, on the train, across a screen.
It seems our minutes are simply being spent,
our lives dispersed in smoke, in empty air.
But the whole is mute. It has no lips
to tell us where the road will lead.
We live in it. It lives in us as well,
and so can speak only through many voices.
When you argue over what will pass, what comes,
what waits for music, for our work, for us,
you are not thinking this alone.
Through your speech the larger life, in the same measure, at the same pace, often in the very same words,
passes through each of us.
Where are you going? The question is not mine alone.
It is put to an age. And our answer
is in words, not stars. You can find it
in any conversation; in them all,
at this hour, it sounds at once.
II. Sagittarius
And then you choose. Not here, not now alone,
but within what moves and endures around us.
Where do I go in this? With whom? What things
do I want to happen in my life?
The current rushes. I am not here to bar its way,
nor drift, a chip of wood without a purpose,
but to be the one within it who has chosen time
and path, and changed the path again this week.
The script collapsed. I found another way,
without abandoning what I was after.
Three notes instead of a whole part, because
my voice has learnt, for the first time, to hear itself.
III. The Axis
Neither stands without the other.
Who hears but never walks is all talk.
Who walks but never listens is stubborn,
insisting that the world stands still. It does not.
It is an engine. We within it
are sparks, making the movement together.
Hear where it all is going; choose where I will go.
That is the axis. All the rest is craft:
words, the road, revisions, patience.