Article · Neptune
Neptune in Gemini: Where Is the World We Speak of Going?
Talking about where music, a profession and a country are heading, and why people have these conversations
Pavel Medvedev · Published: · Updated:
“Is there any point in learning to play at all?” a pupil asks Marina. “A program can already play any piece without mistakes. Where is all this going?”
He is not being lazy. He loves his instrument and is willing to practise. But all around him he hears that machines now write and perform music, that musicians are being laid off, that “it’s all disappearing”. He asks what everyone is asking now: what will happen to music, to the profession, to his own place within it?
Marina could say, “Don’t think about that, practise.” Instead she sits down and talks with him about where music is heading.
A conversation about where music is heading
What is going away, Marina says? Earning a living playing background music in cafés or for advertising: a program is cheaper there. Copying and arranging scores as a craft. Some studio work. This is real, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What remains? The concert, as a meeting rather than a sound. People come to hear people, and a recording does not replace that; otherwise concerts would have ended with the gramophone. Playing together remains, the thing they learn in the ensemble. A machine can imitate hearing someone else and responding, but cannot want to. The teacher remains, because notes do not teach: someone who has been where you are going does.
And where does someone learning now belong in this? Not where the program is stronger, in faultlessness. Where there is a living person with other living people.
The pupil gets no ready-made answer about whether he should learn. But he gets something he did not have: he can hear where the whole he intends to join is heading. In six months he will decide for himself whether to join an ensemble or go into sound engineering, and this conversation will inform that decision. The decision itself belongs to another story, Sagittarius. What matters here is that the movement of music has become audible in words.
The staffroom
In the staffroom they discuss the same thing, this time about the school. Parents take children out after their third year: “They don’t need any more.” Demand for short courses rises; demand for the eight-year curriculum falls. Ensembles and choir, meanwhile, are growing: children want to play together. Where is the music school heading?
This is neither a formal meeting nor a plan. It is a conversation in which everyone adds what they have seen: who left, who arrived, what people ask at open days. From individual remarks, a picture of movement emerges. The school is moving from “complete the curriculum” toward “play together and listen to one another”. Nobody decided this. They heard it.
After such a conversation, each teacher decides in their own way what to work on next year. But they can decide because they have heard where the whole they work within is heading.
The kitchen and the chat
The most common conversation of this kind concerns the country and the world. In the kitchen, in a chat, around a table: where everything is heading, what will happen to prices, jobs and children, what is changing and in which direction. People call this politics, trends, “talk about nothing”.
But look at what people do after these conversations. Move or stay. Change professions or hold on to them. Send a child to one school rather than another. Save or spend. Their decisions draw on what they have heard about the movement of the whole, so the conversation is not empty. The larger whole they all belong to is present in the words between them, not as an object, but as movement: where it is heading.
An old question names this most precisely. According to tradition, the apostle Peter was leaving Rome to escape persecution when he met Christ on the road, walking toward the city. “Quo vadis, Domine?” — “Where are you going, Lord?” Henryk Sienkiewicz made the question the title of his novel about Rome under Nero: a world in motion and people trying to understand where it is going. “Where are you going?” is Neptune in Gemini’s question to the whole.
What an expert knows
An expert hears the movement of their field behind a brief remark. They know the problems from which different approaches arose, why their proponents argued, what has changed since, which questions have been settled, which are being discussed now, and where it is all heading.
So a single sentence tells the expert a great deal: which old debate it belongs to, what is new in it, what the speaker has left unsaid. The expert can explain why the question arose at all and where it leads. This is what someone lacks when they remember the correct answer but do not know the conversation itself, cannot hear where it is moving.
A young teacher asks Marina whether he should go into teaching at all or focus on performing. Marina does not advise him. She describes where music teaching is heading: what is leaving, what is emerging, whom there are too few of and whom there are now plenty of. He then decides for himself, and decides better than he would have on the strength of advice.
Where Neptune’s work lies
All these conversations have a Mercurial side: understanding what is being discussed, what a word means, what a remark refers to. This is the work of Mercury, Gemini’s senior ruler, and it is essential.
Neptune does something else. It keeps the larger whole itself present in the conversation, and present as movement. Not “music” as a subject, but where music is heading. Not “the country”, but where the country is heading. The words in such a conversation are neither opinions nor information: through them the whole the speakers belong to is present, and its movement can be heard.
Neptune’s work here is to prevent something else from taking the place of that movement. A conversation about where music is heading easily turns into one about who thinks what about music, or into prophecy, or complaint. Marina brings it back to movement: what is actually passing away, what really remains, what can be seen in practice. Then you can leave the conversation with a road to take.
Conversation is the movement of the whole
It is worth seeing the scale of this once. Everything we belong to — music, a profession, a town, a country, the time we live in — is moving. In itself it is mute. It can speak only through us, and it speaks in our conversations: in the staffroom, in the kitchen, in a chat, in a pupil’s question. When two people talk about where things are heading, this is not two people exchanging opinions. The whole they both belong to is moving through their words and becoming audible to itself. Each word of such a conversation contains a move of the larger whole rather than information or a judgment.
So Neptune here is not about information. It concerns the presence, in words between people, of something larger than both of them: present as movement rather than as an object, where it is heading, what is leaving and what is arriving. Hearing this means hearing the setting in which you will have to choose.
The shadow: a conversation that leads nowhere
Everyone knows the shadow of this position. People spend years discussing where everything is going and choose nothing. Talk of the movement of the whole that leads to no one’s own course becomes exactly what people call it: idle chatter. This does not mean we should stop talking. It means conversation has a second half, in Sagittarius: we choose our path from what we have heard. The axis is closed only when both halves are present.
Words in which movement lives
The pupil hears from Marina where music is heading. Teachers in the staffroom hear from one another where the school is heading. People in the kitchen hear where the country is heading. An expert hears behind one remark where their work is heading.
None of these conversations decides what to do. But without them there is no basis for deciding: you cannot hear what you are choosing within.
Neptune in Gemini — the movement of the larger whole we are part of, in our words.
Where is the whole we are part of heading, and can that be heard in what we talk about?
In Sagittarius, a person chooses their own course within the movement of the larger whole. Marina leads pupils toward playing together by the road open today, adjusting it as she goes. In Gemini, that movement itself sounds in the words between people. Neither works without the other: without conversation, no path can be chosen; without a path, conversation is empty.
In Virgo, music becomes part of Anton’s life: he came for his friend and stayed for the music. In Pisces, we distinguish participation in the larger whole from the work that develops it in more detail.
The essence of the axis, briefly and without stories: Neptune on the Gemini–Sagittarius Axis.
Overview of all six axes: Neptune: Eternal Contexts.