de Cenizas para Richey Edwards
Richey Edwards (12/22/1967-¿2/1/1995?) 1
why do anything when you can forget eveything
Manic Street Preachers
Me borro.
Me vuelvo esta nada
llena de sombras,
los fantasmas de trazos
escritos bajo la certidumbre
que temblorosa habita
los rincones del fracaso.
Borro las líneas
que forman mi nombre
para volver a la honestidad
límpida del papel vacío;
ahí donde las letras
aún no se ponen a la venta
y se vuelven mentirosas
igual que todas las putas vírgenes,
igual que nosotros
sin poder distinguir ya
lo que nos aterra
de lo que nos complace
mientras grabamos
los discos que reseñan
las revistas de la crítica
en el círculo del purgatorio
donde todos dicen “sí”
y todas las calificaciones son “
donde con sólo tomar un micrófono
te muestran el pacto del aplauso
y basta con obedecer,
hacerte de amigos convenientes,
seguirles su juego insufrible
y tomar sus consejos
para descubrir un aroma de paraíso
en las llamas de la putrefacción.
Me borro.
Ya no me levanto temprano
y desarmé cada reloj
que había en mi casa.
Las fiestas se volvieron
eventos diplomáticos.
Ya no creo más en grados académicos
ni elogios epigramáticos en reseñas.
Al trazar la arquitectura
de mi honestidad en blanco
dicen que me vuelvo
carnicero de mi propia fama.
Creo en nada: mi nada,
tan propia, tan blanca.
Milito en el olvido
para des-trazar cada trozo
ya subastado de mi vida;
para andarla de nuevo,
esta vez como quien intenta andar sobre la nieve
sin destrozarle con sus pisadas la blancura.
Sadly, It Makes Sense/ followed by The Manic Street Preachers Afterlife
"According to a spokesperson for Manic Street Preachers, guitarist Richey Edwards' legal status has been changed from "missing" to "presumed dead". Edwards went missing from a hotel in central London on February 1, 1995 aged 27. His car was found near the Severn Bridge, and it is believed Edwards took his own life."
"A lawyer representing Richey Edwards' family has stressed that changing the guitarist's status to "presumed dead" was "not the same as an acceptance that he is dead". Should Edwards ever return he would be a very wealthy man, since Manic Street Preachers have been paying 25% of all royalties into a special fund ever since his disappearance in 1995."
"The Marxists, Situationists, pseudo-bisexual-BAD POETS avec eyeliner, pseudo-leopardskin BAD POETS sans eyeliner, and the rest of the Cult Of Nothing should accept, for the last time, that with Richey went all feeble hopes of purity and guitars and profound graffiti."
Pete Doherty
Meanwhile, The Manics are recording a new album with the "lyrics left to us by Richey. Finally it feels like the right time to use them"
***The Manics Afterlife:An Antinecrological Note
Upon the Death of Richey Edwards
& Its Dialectic Impossibility
However, I still find appallingly enticing this undead status in which Richey is kept, as if a sort of aura would be cast upon the Manics solely by the slightest hope that he's alive.
Even "presumed" sounds as a comfortable adjective beside the unspeakable word. In the narrative traced by the Manics, Dead has not been the only unspeakable word. Richey, in an interview, once mentioned he had not thought about the "S" word that would have made him jump off a cliff few months later.
Richey left behind him a misty path, plenty of unspeakables and denials. It was the matter of urban legends what Richey was dealing with. It has been like that since plawright Cristopher Marlowe died in 1593: a young, androgynous man, who holds on his shoulder the double reputation of being both a genius and a lover of excesses meets his self-determined destiny in the darkest of ways available.
Marlowe may have not desired death. However, he didn't acknowledge he was opening new paths not only in poetic drama but also shaping paradigms of sexual identity and public persona. As Marlowe was being stabbed he established a new type of tragedy [off-stage, this time] in which fame, youth, talent, gender, scandal and mystery are the main clusters. Richey was aware that he was following a patern of, let's call it stardom, already trodden by many before him. His contribution to this rise -and-fall-type of tale is, doubtless, to not die at all, but to keep himself amidst life and death, redefining the conditions of stardom afterlife.
Every Manics' record since Everything Must Go is pervaded by a mournful ethos that is expressed through songs that show an increasingly, though restrained, desire to become open elegies. At some extent every new Manics' album should be named Everything Must Go, the kind of phrase to say during an unending farewell. A farewell to a hero whose truely great deed is making his own agony a never-ending departure that is also the fittest vessel for his whole legend.
As Manics keep going on, the legend is enlarged and Richey becomes, each time more clearly, the distinctive icon of a band hardly recognizable if compared to that which recorded an album as clever, zeitgeistish, ironic and angst-plenty as The Holy Bible. It's impossible to say that Richey is dead without implying that the Manics are so alive, but not otherwise. If the Manics are alive as a band it turns impossible, at least dialecticly, to accept that Richey, as a public persona, is dead.
***
[that's, at least, how you'll remain]
from Generation Terrorist (1992)
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