ONLY CONNECT: Speech Acts
New Moon in Gemini
Welcome to ONLY CONNECT, a monthly series of micro-essays on new moon energies and related thoughts by friend of the letter, Moselle. Today: notes on our new moon in Gemini, exact at 11:02pm ET.
The Gemini New Moon this Tuesday is very grammatical; as in, there is a grammatical fixation.
Usually I think of Gemini as a sign of whizzing words spoken at full volume and cross-sectional constellations of people and places; linkage between gears and parts, with a volubility both hyper-caffeinated and boozy. Seasonally, it signals a period energized enough for physical world connectivity and change; travel, transit, zags of input-output stimulation. This particular moon and sky assembly—with Gemini’s ruler Mercury stationed in its natural sign, along with the Sun—does function in that register, in that it encourages an occupation with our own sitcoms: possibilities for fresh stories and narrative rewrites, time spent on new scripts (Uranus is hovering nearby) or a rehashing of familiar ones.
In these explorations, though, there is need for a mindfulness around grammar, an attention to the building blocks of life: its sentence-structures, how we read and reread ‘eats shoots and leaves,’ how we affect or effectuate its understandings—parsing our responsibility in shaping (and not only channeling) words as one would, loosely and critically, a plot. Languaging with care what is said from within our psyches or to each other, and only then, adjudicating speedy materializations of hows and whens. This is a New Moon of speech and speech-acts, of direct-to-video discussions and expressions, ordained with precision. Relatively quickly, it becomes easier to be precise without becoming bogged down, and to translate that precision into a broader fluency with the border-space of cause, concept and situational consequences.
This porousness may come with an aura of confusion, between what is spoken or dreamed of in one domain and transposed upon another. Gemini being twinned, I am reminded of “Soap Gets in Your Eyes,” an episode from That Girl (1966-71) when Marlo Thomas’ Ann Marie, a flailing actress in New York, meets her boyfriend’s mother, who has conflated Ann’s villainous performance on a soap opera with her actual character. That similar stand-in types—celebrities and public figures, pedal-pushed on us with a risibly craven relentlessness—seem to have assumed more cultural potency and buy-in over recent months affirms how we, too, are soaped up, allowing for truth-skating slippages. Across the imaginal realms, we are doing the necessary work of believing and yearning and desiring. Only this labor need not be harvested solely to empower our collective projections—to speak in vintage terms, a media of “halogens”—while individual range is hemmed in. Detaching from installed synchronicities and force-fed limerances, redirecting focus to private grammars: somewhere, we must draw a line.
In this spirit, the New Moon is situated favorably vis-a-vis Neptune and Saturn in Aries, representing visionary processing (hopefully, now personalized) and a going-for-it gravitas. Both feel notable or urgent to prioritize as other variables are arrested, at a moment when a palpable economics is at play for many of us, a sense of scope closing in on several fronts, almost nostalgically Covidian. Yet life, at least in its Gemini interpretation, is about impressions and questions, about vocalizing many overlapping angles of observation. When George Steiner wrote in Grammars of Creation (2001), “we have no more beginnings,” referring to benighted notions of invention versus discovery across Western knowledge traditions, he was, of course, Fukuyama-level early; for, as we are learning, beginnings can also, always, begin again.
New Moon Ritual
A neuroplasticity exercise, or the quickest way to change your life, is the psychiatric couch in motion: inner monologue aloud into a microphone during a long walk. Transcribe the recording and begin to modify previously untold thoughts.
