Spirit Move Me

Note I wrote this almost two months ago and saved it as a draft. I was just talking to someone about music reaction videos, so I thought I'd finally publish this.

June 4 --- A couple days ago. I was indulging in one of offbeat pleasures, which is watching Youtube of Millennials and GenZers reacting to hearing classic pop songs from the 1960s-1980s for the first ever time---old standards that most of my generation would easily recognize, but which are completely new to them. There are multiple Youtube channels devoted specifically to this.

Before discover this a couple years ago, it's fair to say that I had burned out on the catalog of songs I grew up with to the point of avoiding listening to them, because they had worn such deep grooves in my mind, and also I could feel overtly the emotions they were meant to create it me, some of which I did not care to feel, and felt resentful they had been foisted on me that way.

But the Youtubers I mention are fun. The vicarious experiences of hearing old familiar songs for the firsts time makes them come alive again. I prefer it usually over the originals in most cases.

It all started because of a line from an old song that got stuck in my head: "whirling like a cyclone in my mind." Anyone deeply familiar with the 1970s pop catalog would instantly recognize that as being a line from "Could It Be Magic?", which was a big hit for Barry Manilow, who became a superstar during those years.

I decided I wanted to hear the song again, as it had been a long time. Since all old songs are on Youtube, it's easy to find them that way, just the recording and not even the music video. But instead of listening to it directly, I decided I preferred to watch a reaction video of it.

The young folk who make these reaction videos (almost always in teams--pairs or more) usually start with a spoken introduction where they talk for a few minutes before putting on their headphones. The song is often one suggested in comments to previous videos. We get to listen along with them as they experience the song for the first time, although sometimes they will say they recognize part of it (because it's been "sampled" by a more contemporary artist).  Often they have never heard of a song that was famous at the time. Sic transit gloria mundi.  

Their biggest challenge is Youtube copyright restrictions. They have to do tricks to keep from being dinged by Youtube for playing a copyrighted song. Almost always that means stopping the song one or more times while it plays, which can be frustrating if you know the song and it is about to come to a cool part. Often their videos get taken down anyway. It depends on who owns the song.

After I discovered these videos, I went on a huge binge of many different Youtube "reaction streamers". Then when I was sated, Youtube's algorithm kept showing me more suggestions for months on end until they finally quit. From time to time I go an a mini binge of watching some of these because they are so fun. My favorite team is probably the Rob Squad, which is a husband and wife (I think) who live in Oklahoma (I think). They have covered a lot of ground of pop music history and watching them react to most songs is a delight. 

"Could it Be Magic?" is one of those songs that I would classify as the cultural peak of its genre for its time.  There are probably ten to twenty such songs throughout that era that define a particular pinnacle of pop music artistry. There is nothing that can match "Could it Be Magic?" as a love ballad (maybe "We've Only Just Begun" by the Carpenters comes to mind). Manilow starts with a piano opening taken from a Chopin prelude and extends it with an original melody, first softly then building it up in intensity, in an attempt (successful I think) to write his own "Hey Jude" (itself certainly one of the "pinnacle songs").  It's weird to think of this playing on the radio across America in the 1970s, but that is the culture in which we lived.

From the first line, "Spirit move me...", the lyrics are mostly beautiful and stirring, occasionally sublime--- well maybe until you get the line about "high up where the stallion meets the sun."  But that's the 1970s for you. After all, we had macramé hanging on our walls and ferns next to the stereo. Note Donna Summer did a disco cover of the song, changing the first line to "spirits move me", which degrades the song to me, changing from something manifestly holy to something evoking a séance. I prefer the Manilow version that does the same invocation as Milton at the beginning of Paradise Lost "and chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer before all temples the upright heart and pure..."

The instrumental bridge in the middle makes it one of those songs that seems to transport one to another dimension beyond time---both the past and some other world when one's storylines warp and bend beyond one's current reality. Manilow starts the song in tender softness, as I said, but at the end, he is practically screaming out the lines in passion, like he's trying lead his beloved to safety from a burning building  Nothing like it today. 

I remember when the song was popular on the radio and in the mall, etc. Being curious about timing, I went to Wikipedia and discovered that it was written by Manilow (music) and one of is frequent collaborators (lyrics) in 1970 but at the time Manilow was not yet a recording artist on his own. Three years later he released a version as a B-side with a radically different interpretation  (produced by Tony Orlando (of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" fame) in a bubblegum style---OMG!). Thankfully they re-recorded and gave us one of the finest compositions of the time. The well-known version that hit number six on the Billboard Chart (only number six! what a time it was!) was released in June 1975, fifty years ago this month.

How many forty-nine year olds are walking around who were...?  Well, you get the idea.

Here is the usual link to the lyrics, for the lyrics challenged. 

And here is the Rob Squad video. 

Spoiler alert: they both loved it.  Such great body energy at the end as they sway.  Rob: "I'm not even going to call that a song. That's a masterpiece." 

Now I just have to avoid watching ten more of the reaction videos after this. Youtube notices when I do that and will push them at me.

Where is the road now?

While reading Vanity Fair today, I remarked on the route of the coach carrying Becky through greater London to reach Queen's Crawley at the of Chapter 7. 

We start in Mayfair at the fictional Great Gaunt Street, which is supposedly based on Hill Street.

the carriage at length drove away --- now, threading the dark lanes of Aldersgate, anon clattering by the Blue Cupola of St. Paul's, jingling rapidly by the strangers' entry of the Fleet-Market, which, with Exeter 'Change, has now departed to the world of shadows -- how they passed the White Bear in Piccadilly, and saw the deew rising up from the market-gardens of Knightsbridge -- how Turnham Green, Brentford, Bagshot were passed -- need not be told here.

Oh, but it must be told, musn't it? Else why else tell it to us? I dig into the route, some of which I already know from my knowledge of historic London:

1. Leaving the Crowley house on Great Gaunt Stree in Mayfair. We start smack in the middle of Westminster, which is the city within Greater London that is just upstream on the Thames from the old City of London.  The river makes a great bend to the south there, as one goes upriver. Right near the bend, in ancient times a small stream one entered the Thames, and as it did so, the stream split, making an eyot, which the name of a island formed in just this manner, by a river or stream splitting before it enters into another larger stream.

This island appears to have been a sacred place to the pagan Celts. It was at this island where the ancient Celtic road network crossed the Thames, or rather, the ancient Britons operated a ferry across the great river, allowing passage to the southern part of the island. Having conquered the island, the Romans had little use for this particular crossing. Instead they made their own, in the form of a wooden pontoon bridge down river, near the one of the last discernible hillocks on the north side of the river.

This bridge was strategic in that it allowed the Romans a short cut to the north side of the Thames estuary on the North Sea, and in particular to Camulodunum, the hilltop settlement of one of the most powerful Celtic tribes. It shaved several miles off the crossing upriver at the eyot. 

The Romans garrisoned the hillock and eventually it became a Roman city with walls and gates. This is what is meant by the "City of London"---the ancient Roman walled city. Within three hundred years, it had the largest Roman forum north of the Alps. The bridge apparently has continued to exist to this day, being rebuilt many times even through the Dark Ages, and is called London Bridge.  London was born Roman and the bridge was its primary purpose. The city was built to protect the bridge and secure the route northward.

2. Aldersgate. The carriage containing Pitt Crawley, Becky Sharp, and the others going eastward, and enters the old City through the ward by this name. Aldersgate was one of the gates in the old Roman walls. It existed through medieval times as was the one used by James Stuart to enter the City as king after the restoration. It was torn down and rebuilt in 1617, damaged in the first of 1666, and finally torn down for good in 1761, over half a century before the events of the story. Nevertheless the name survives even today.

The carriage then passes Fleet-Market (presumably on present day Fleet Street in the City, named for the River Fleet, a tributary of the Thames) and the Exeter 'Change. Both of these had been demolished by the time Thackeray wrote his novel, as he himself notes. 

3. Picadilly, Knightsbridge. But, here's where the route doesn't make sense to me. Why did they go into the City of London, and then suddenly we are in Picadilly, which is back in Westminster? They have backtracked to the west. Then they are at Knightsbridge, which is further west in Westminster. (I have found memories of purchasing a beefeater teddy bear for my nieces at the Harrod's department store at Knightsbridge in November 2000.)

3. Turnham Green, Brentford. Now we are going further upriver into West London.

4. Bagshot. Finally we have crossed the Thames (where?) and in Surrey, the county south of London. This is an interesting little place. From Wikipedia, I learned:

Bagshot is a large village in the Surrey Heath borough of Surrey, England, approximately 27 miles southwest of central London. In the past, Bagshot served as an important staging post between London, Southampton and the West Country, evidenced by the original coaching inns still present in the village today.

Coaching inns for travel to the West Country? Now you are talking. This is interesting. The West Country includes Cornwall. At once I realize that were I to make a trip to Cornwall, I would, after arriving in England, stay several days in Mayfair perhaps.  One could officially begin the tour on the eyot in Westminster that was once sacred to the Celts, where their ferry once crossed the river. and where today one finds Westminster Abbey, which has been the location for coronation of the kings of England for over a thousand years.

Then I'd follow the route of Vanity Fair, going into the City, to experience the ancient Roman fortress that is now the financial district (located where the old Roman forum once stood), and the location of the great edifice of St. Paul's that dominates the river near the latest incarnation of the old bridge.

Then I go back upriver through Westminster, stopping in Picadilly and Knightsbridge, and passing through Turnham Green and Brentford before making my way to Bagshot. There I would stay in the night in one of the old coaching inns before proceeding towards the West Country.

Thackeray, in his whimsical way, indulges us with a nostalgia for the days of coach travel. By the time he wrote Vanity Fair, this way of life had vanished and been replaced within living memory by the rail travel. Aha! I say to myself. This is part of the core significance of the story---life before the railroad.  That is very interesting to me. Here is his description of the lost way of life:

Where is the road now, and its merry incidents of life? ..the honest pimple-nosed coachmen? I wonder where they are, those good fellows? and the waiters, yea, and the inns at which they waited, and the cold rounds of beef inside, and the stunted ostler, with his blue nose and clinking pail, where is he, and where is his generation? ....who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, these men and things will be as much lengend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion...For them stage-coaches will have become romances -- a team of four bays as fabulous as Bucephalus or Black Bess. Ah, how their coats shone, as the stablemen pulled their clothes off, and away they went---ah, how their tails shook, as with smoking sides at the stage's end they demurely walked away into the inn-yard. Alas! we shall never hear the horn sing at midnight, or see the pike-gates fly open any more? 

It reminds me of the American nostalgia for the mid century road experience (i.e. Route 66 culture), one that was replaced by the coming of the Interstate highway system. 

The State of the Cornish Language

 What is the Cornish speaking community like?

I’m not sure how accurate it is overall to talk of “the Cornish speaking community” — there’s actually no settled community anywhere in the world where the Cornish language is spoken on a day-to-day basis as anyone’s primary language. There are families where one or both parents speak Cornish fluently and raise their children to speak it, so it’s spoken in the home and with friends and relatives who also speak it. But overall there aren’t very many people who do or have done this. And even if they speak Cornish at home, they’ll have to revert to English as soon as they go out shopping, or when they go to school or the workplace. There just isn’t (yet?) a permanent and self-sustaining community of speakers who can and do use the language constantly in every aspect of their lives, as can be done with Welsh for those who live in a majority Welsh-speaking area. So yes, the only people who can be said to be first language speakers of Cornish are those few who’ve been raised speaking it at home, but there’s really no “total immersion” environment even for them (except for an occasional day or weekend at a language event).

Learning Cornish will be a challenge. It is not the formal aspects of the language itself. I know enough Welsh and Breton to make it seem familiar out of the gate.

The biggest challenge comes the issue in the passage above. There are no geographic communities where one can reasonably expect to use Cornish throughout the day. Of course anything you do on the Internet will be in English, but that's the same situation you see with many other languages right now, which have official language status in nations with their own governments, armies and navies, and businesses that conduct business in that language. English is threatening all other existing languages that way. It wasn't in a position to do this before the Internet, but especially after social media, it is a trend that is accelerating, even in places like France.

Cornish is actually trying to return from extinction. Cornish speakers would love to have the problems of either Welsh or Breton, both which of are in a many better place than Cornish, even despite the longstanding attempts to wipe out the latter by the French government.  But Breton could disappear easily within another two generations and be where Cornish is now. Cornish may actually succeed because it already bottomed out, and has a dedicated community to revive it over time. The fact that anyone speaks it at all at this point is a great success.

But the goal is always to have a community---a town of some size where one can live one's life for most purposes, and which Cornish is the daily language. That means that when a truck goes down the street for, say plumbing, or heating and cooling repair, that the language on the side of the truck is predominantly Cornish.  This is the true dividing line being languages that are living versus ones that are now. Is there such a place as I describe? 

The key social dynamic for stability is whether mothers speak that language with their infants, and continue to speak it with them as they grow up. If this happens the language survives. When it stops, the language dies.

I have read that historians have noted that the Celtic loan words into English, which were acquired after the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Post-Roman Celtic Britain, skew heavily to the distaff---that is, words that would have been used predominantly by women. That means that the Roman-era Celtic British language (which would evolve into Breton, Welsh, and Cornish), hung on among women longer than men. It was conserving aspect of society at the time. 

I have a rather esoteric mystical theory about language learning that the ease of learning a language depends mostly on how many other people speak it. English is easiest. Chinese likewise is a very easy language to master simple sentences and conversation. It has nothing to do with anything about immersion. It applies even if. you are studying by yourself, with no outside help, from a book or tape course. Somehow the mechanism is not concrete in that sense. But it is. It's like the collective brain waves of everyone speaking that language make a sea of such energy vibrations that are tuned to that language specifically, and that it is easiest to plug into that when it is stronger, and harder when it is weaker. A language like Cornish will have a very weak signal, since at the moment I write this, there are less than a thousand people who speak it fluently. But that's probably enough, I think

The Island of Serendipity

 On Saturday it is my practice to attempt to rise early enough to hear the livestream of the Polish version of the Rosary at Lourdes. As opposed to the other daily languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian), they only do Polish once a week, early on Saturday.  Each one takes a half hour exactly and they go right after the other, except after French, when there a break until Spanish, as the French one is broadcast on television and features additional commentary and voice recordings of people calling in their prayers thanking the Holy Mother.

A couple years back I memorized the Polish version of the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary, learning them painfully syllable by syllable until it rolls off the tongue. Among other things, listening has embedded the sound and rhythm of. Polish into my brain so I pick out more and more of it over time.

This morning I got up earlier than usual and was out on the patio bringing up the livestream and remendered that before the Polish stream, they have been doing a stream from the Indian subcontinent, a language I do not recognize. The priest also speaks English. I know this because he is often the priest who leads the English version at 6 AM my time. He alternates with an African priest. Both have thick accents indicating their respective origins. 

When I saw the 5 AM version, it bothered me that I could not identify the language being spoken. Was it Hindi, or some other language of India, either Indo-European or Dravidian? This morning I listened particularly closely, trying to identify a reliable grouping of coherent syllables. One step at a time. The first words of the prayer came too fast for now, but there was a build up to the end of the phrase that sounded like "pengula lassi". I could hear it distinctly each time through.

Seeing what I could do with that, I went to ChatGPT and told them the situation. I gave them details on the broadcast and the apparent ethnicity of the priest. I asked AI to help me. It told me there are several chapelains at Lourdres who are from Sri Lanka. The language was probably either Tamil (a Dravidian language) or Singhala (an Indo-European language), or perhaps Hindi.

Then I gave ChatGPT that I thought it heard the priest say "pengula lassi" at the end of the first phrase. It said that was great information, and that said that meant it was likely Tamil. But the version ChatGPT offered me of the Hail Mary in Tamil didn't match up with that syllables well (transliterated of course---I can't decipher the Tamil alphabet). I was not satisfied.

Then I resorted to a plain old fashioned Google search to look up the Tamil text of the Hail Mary. Perhaps ChatGPT had a different version? I found this page. Bingo. Tamil text, transliterated, is given as:

Arul niraintha Mariyaa vazhga
Karther ummdena pengalukkul
Asirvathikka pettaval Neeray.
Ummudaya thiruvayattin kaniyakiya
Yesuvum asirvathikka pettavaray.
Archishista Marie Sarvaswaranudaya Mathavay
Pavigalaiya erukkira engalukkaka
eppoluthum engal marana nerathilum vendikollum.

The "arul niraintha" was going by too fast for me to to hear, but once I saw it printed, I knew that's what he was saying. The second line ended with "pengalukkul" which was almost exactly how I'd written down "pengula". But what about "pengula lassi"? Ah, it's on the next line. One think one learns is that one cann ot use the line breaks as pauses, but sometimes entire lines flow together. The beginning of one word sounds like it has been tacked onto the end of a previous word. Very common.

I suppose I will have to memorize this and learn it, as I have done for core Rosary prayers in...let's review...English, Latin, French, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish. At one time I attempted to learn the prayers in Vietnamese, as they do a Vietnamese Rosary at Lourdes on special occassions, probably when there are a country pilgrims from that country. One can watch the recorded broadcasts. It's good to have multiple ones because even native speakers pronounce things differently.  In any case I didn't succeed because I don't speak a word of Vietnamese, and so I was going on pure syllabic pronunciation as I heard it chanted. Yes, Vietnamese chants it, because it's a tone language. If I made an effort, I could get it. 

So I have yet to be able to do a non-Indo-European language. Tamil might be the best place to start. It's not tonal. Also it's cool to learn a language spoken on the island of Ceylon, which is what it was labeled on maps when I was a kid. I have learned that comes from Ceilão, the name the Portuguese gave the island when they arrived in 1505. Persians and the Arabs had called it Sarandeeb, which the same root as our word serendipity, and which itself comes from Sanskrit. Sri Lanka is the name of the island in Sinhala, the which is the most widely spoken language. The name in Tamil is இலங்கை, which can be transliterared as Ilankai. 

ChatGPT offered to make this chart for me, to follow the broadcast:

Tamil Transliteration	Phonetic (by ear)	English Meaning
Arul niraintha Mariyaa vazhga	Ah-rool nir-ain-tha Ma-ri-yaa vaazh-ga	Hail Mary, full of grace
Karther ummdena pengalukkul Asirvathikka pettaval Neeray	Kar-thar um-mu-dey-na pengaloo-lassi-rva-thikka pet-ta-val Neer-ay	The Lord is with you; blessed are you among women
Ummudaya thiruvayattin kaniyakiya Yesuvum asirvathikka pettavaray	Um-mu-daya thiru-vai-yat-tin kani-yaa-ki-ya Ye-su-vum aasi-rva-thikka pet-ta-va-ray	And blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus
Archishista Marie Sarvaswaranudaya Mathavay	Arch-i-shis-ta Ma-ri-yay Sar-vas-va-ra-nu-daya Ma-tha-vay	Holy Mary, Mother of God
Pavigalaiya erukkira engalukkaka	Paavi-gal-aya yeru-kira en-ga-luk-kaaga	Pray for us sinners
eppoluthum engal marana nerathilum vendikollum	Eppo-lu-thum en-gal mara-na nera-thi-lum ven-di-kol-lum	Now and at the hour of our death
Amen	Aah-men	Amen

Gone Girl on the Train

 My current stack of books in active reading include the following:

1. Vanity Fair, Thackeray

2. Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks

3. Selected Writings, Samuel Johnson

4. Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe, Michael S. Neiberg

Books in my active reading as August 10, 2025

The one I am apt to finish next is Brooks. Johnson will take a while, but it is an anthology, and I don't want to rush the works of the great man. Like Vanity Fair is not something one rams through. It should be savored like a banquet until the moment that one is too eager to learn what happens next, and one's reading begins to accelerate to the climax. 

The Neiberg book is one I checked out from the Phoenix public library. The time period of history, the transition from war to peace in 1945 and the years after, is one that I am particularly fascinated with. 

Also there was actually a fifth book until last night, when I finished it. Last week I withdrew a copy of Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins from the little free library in the park. Last March in a similar fashion I had borrowed, read and returned Gone Girl, a book I thoroughly enjoyed on multiple levels. But I had thought Gone Girl was supposed to be about a girl on a train, so I got confused when there was no train. Girl on the Train is the same genre of the "disappeared girl" stories, which seems to be arguably the most impactful genre of contemporary fiction. I read it in less than a week, which is very fast for me.

Now I have read both. Gone Girl is by far the more sophisticated story, with a complicated villain, who fate leaves one in an ambiguous state. Girl on the Train borrows the technique of having multiple first person narrators, with chapters indicated by dates. Girl on the Train is a more conventional story but still works. Villain is a husband who cheats, and cheats on the person he cheated with, and batters his wives and mistresses, and lies all around. Easy to root against him when you find out who he is.  

I noticed a third book in this genre, set in Dublin, out at the little free library last spring, but it's no longer there, and I can't recall the title.