Shall I pray?
Shall I venerate and be ceremonious?I have pried through the strata, and analyzed to a hair,
I have counsel'd with doctors and calculated close,
And found no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
-Walt Whitman, song of myself
kyielle elation! Kyielle elation! Kyielle elation! Crystal elation! Crystal elation! Crystal elation! Elation immanse! Elation immanse! Elation immanse! Sing to us! Sing to us! Sing to us! Amam! So me nearest languished hister be free to me. I'm fading! And listen you, you beauty I'll be clue to who knows you, pray Magde Marthe with Luz and Joan while I lie with warm lisp on the Tolka. I'm fay.
-james joyce, from Finnegans Wake
I was an infant when my mother went
To see an atheist burned. She took me there.
The dark-robed priests were met around the pile;
The multitude was gazing silently;
And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,
Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,
Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;
The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs;
His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;
His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob
Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept.
"Weep not, child!" cried my mother, "for that man
Has said, 'There is no God.'"
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem VII (1813)
credits
from Venimus, vidimus, audivimus vocem (NOC 6/21/15),
released June 21, 2015
BARRY SEROFF wrote "Atheist Hymns" for vocal quartet. It’s sung by Kamala Sankaram, Rima Fand, Jon Olson, and George Wright.
A brain-melter from Belgium’s Joeri Chipsvingers, this album goes full Beefheart on contemporary classical music, turning it inside out. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 19, 2020