Trawling the Megahertz of the Gemini Full Moon
I explore tonight's factious Full Moon through the AI art renaissance, Balenciaga, Twitter chaos, and my own experiences wintering in the desert highlands of Mexico.
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf (Mars in Gemini), The Waves
This Full Moon in Gemini the pomegranates are splitting. Hades fruit bending on the branches: eclipse season’s consolation prize. I plucked a few and placed them in a bowl on the rose onyx table. Their chthonic cargo flares in the setting sun. The hummingbirds — Mercury’s emissaries with their five-second plans — chase each other in infinity loops. Lizards slip into loopholes in the courtyard tiles. I’m living in a painting by Giorgo de Chirico: I watch the progression of canted shadows on the white plaster walls. Occasional bursts of starlings like volleys of arrows. I’m wintering here, on my Uranus line, as Mars retrograde brings me to my knees.
How many sorrows can the heart hold on its feathered spandrels? Many. Potentially infinite. This Full Moon conjoins my Saturn in the seventh house: the setting place according to the ancients. Every evening I let the sun leave its death-blaze on my sacrum. I imagine its kintsugi rushing the splinters behind my sacrum. You don’t repair the cracks — you gild the wound. And these binding sigils become protective amulets.
In the middle distance, a network of abandoned silver mines. I imagine the sun’s molten gold rushing those grottos too, into whatever primordial forgery deep in the earth the sun goes to bleed out every night. The 7th house is where we merge, where we consecrate binding oaths — where we melt into the other. We trust that our life-giving luminary will return from its nightly katabasis (though we can never know for certain).
This Full Moon, this cold moon — sidled up against a Mars on the verge of a nervous breakdown — marks the halfway point of our warrior’s progress through its time-line hacking retrograde. Tonight Mars is also the closest to earth in its orbit that it gets, only for its peak brightness to be occulted by the Moon. Literally, as I typed this, a banyan leaf suddenly unscrolled from its casing, spraying my laptop with water. This is a moment of everything membranous, interstitial — or blithely held together by tape — suddenly giving out.
I stepped onto the communal terrace tonight and could see Mars’s pinkprick of blood about to be swallowed by our cosmic anima. A cold Moon to smother Mars’s sparking live wire (the one we know we shouldn’t touch but can’t stop). Even the Sabian Symbol for 16 degrees Gemini highlights the feminine principle: “A woman activist in an emotional speech dramatizing her cause.” Rudyar calls this degree the “proselytizing mind”, though we’re dealing with Gemini decan two, which is ruled by the 9 of Swords. In the Thoth system, “The Lord of Cruelty” seeding the agonies of the mind that keep us pacing the kitchen with a bottle of whiskey at 3 am (or passion flower tea for this Gemini rising).
This Moon speaks in many flayed tongues. In endless hyperlinks. In the reverb of mandela effects. It’s the singularity of memes finally hyperstitioning our reality. It’s the AI renaissance and the ethical labyrinth that opens before us. It’s our own yassification by the bots, as a chorus of social media users say they long to look like how the AI sees them: neon-lit by endless cyberpunk dystopias and aggregated across infinite data sets — how will the gaze of a single human lover ever compete with that?
I also see this Moon in Elon Musk’s Twitter chaos breaking apart one of Big Tech’s most impenetrable power blocs (Gemini is where it all falls to pieces). As the Full Moon and Mars conjoin Twitter’s natal Mars, our most enigmatic billionaire promises to strip the company and reveal the secret wires in its walls. Matt Taibi’s work through the Twitter files reveals the extent to which the world’s most powerful “open square” was censored by the DNC. This story is still unfolding and feels especially potent plugged into this powderkeg of a Moon. I’m fascinated to see where it goes.
In a world already prised apart by a particularly harrowing eclipse season, and stepped in dragon bile, Mars retrograde is here to deal the final death blow of whatever centers are still holding. Gemini is the ultimate collagist after all, lately intersplicing fascism, Balenciaga gimp masks, Jesus Christ, Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs and pastel Hitler infographics. More on all of this in another post, but remember that Mars in Gemini is also the master of misdirection. The timing of the twinned furores surrounding Balenciaga and Ye feels deliberate — a squid ink cloud of conspiracy to distract from the story that really matters. The one that starts with Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Something that struck me in the wake of the highly controversial Balenciaga photo shoot was the degree to which conspiracy theorizing has bled into the mainstream and the ways in which this might be weaponized — a new opiate of the masses (or brave new marketing horizon). Mars retrograde in Gemini is thought war, after all. As far as dopamine harvesting goes, conspiracy around pedo sex rings has to be one of the top shelf feeds.
I went down the Tik-Tok k-hole for “research purposes” the other night and was not surprised to see an entire cottage industry of Zoomers poring over every “easter egg” in the highly unsettling photo shoot, as one would a Taylor Swift album release or the latest episode of White Lotus. The sheer volume of content rhizomatically sporing around Balenciaga could probably have kept me going for days in a dissociated fugue state. It seemed to be crossing over with Kanye too and that horrific quadruple murder in Idaho: quite the trifecta of salacious slop in the Tik-Tok feeding trough. It’s enough to make you believe that China’s long-game is indeed some sort of spiritual warfare.
In a way, this Full Moon moment feels like the apotheosis of our post-pandemic screen world, during which time we gazed, the ultimate captive audience, into the machines. But they also gazed into us. We ourselves became unconscious algorithmic sorters, making split-second binary decisions about other humans based on the emojis in their Twitter bios.
Perhaps these escalating AI art trends actually represent a portion of the human population roko-basilisking their compliance into the future (whenever the robots really do take over — probably during Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus in Gemini). But I think there’s something else at play here. A strange erotic frisson in seeing one’s soul — one’s affect — reduced to pure surface. Pure aesthetic formulae. Are we not tasting a form of immortality when we submit ourselves to the AI’s extraordinary swiss-army knife? Its dodecahedron of blades and blurring tools transforming us into benign, cow-eyed, a-historical angels from a future that’s careening toward us — faster than ever.
The other night I was drinking mezcal with my neighbor and his visiting friend from NYC: a Scorpio designer from the East Village. Conversation turned to my vecino’s beloved deceased mother: an elegant woman. Did he have any pictures? The designer drew my attention to a 1940’s cut glass chandelier in the apartment’s foyer — one the mother’s prized possessions. “I don’t need to see a picture,” the designer remarked, taking a drag from his joint. “Her soul is there, in every point of light. Dispersed between every pendeloque. This will show you more of her than a photo ever could.”
As this Gemini rising is deeply deeply exhausted, Ye will wait for another post. For now, one of my faves from Prefab Sprout. This is the title track from an album that Gemini Paddy McAloon conceived of while rendered blind due to detached retinas. During that time he drew comfort from shortwave radio, chat shows, phone in programs, and documentaries. He would later collage these acoustic fragments into the concept album “I Trawl the Megahertz”, later released under the Prefab Sprout band name (though it was a profound departure from their new wave sound). Yvonne Connors provided the haunting spoken word vocals in the song below. It helped calm my spinning thoughts tonight — I hope it does the same for you. xoxo