Sia: The death of Sison

IF MEMORY serves, the late philosopher Mortimer J. Adler encourages all serious readers in his landmark classic How to Read a Book to read from time to time books they normally wouldn't read, especially for ideological reasons; if he did not say it outright, then he must have implied it strongly. I'm sure that Adler, as a true intellectual worthy of the name, would agree one hundred percent with the idea.

After all, in his “great books” reading list, he includes books as diverse and conflicting as the Christian Bible, the works of America's Founding Fathers, Voltaire's Candide, and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital – if that's not being open-minded, I do not know what is!

Adler to me has always been a hero worthy of emulation, so much so that I take to heart his eternal advice to readers. That means even though I disagree very much with almost everything the Left stands for, I make it a point to sometimes read their literature. One such work is a poem written in 1968 by no less than Jose Maria Sison himself, titled The Guerrilla is Like a Poet.

The first stanza goes thus: “The guerrilla is like a poet / Keen to the rustle of leaves / The break of twigs / The ripples of the river / The smell of fire / And the ashes of departure.”

You can read the rest on his website, and to be sure it's not a bad poem at all.

A typical college education nowadays means receiving not a little Marxist indoctrination, especially from impertinent but required humanities courses like philosophy and literature. Thanks to college, I have become all too well-versed in the art of leftist interpretation, of which there are three main types: feminist, Freudian, and Marxist.

It is the Marxist type of reading that is most relevant to our purposes here. Simply put, the poem speaks of a communist guerrilla's stealthy and difficult trek through the wilderness to an eventual confrontation with the authorities he and his comrades aim to overthrow.

Sison's vivid descriptions of the terrain our guerrilla has to slog through call to mind Mao Zedong's Long March across China, which perhaps was something Sison hoped to emulate back when he was younger and more capable.

But Sison never got to carry out his own Long March. Today, he lives in the lap of luxury in Europe while his hapless followers unquestioningly continue to fight his battles here.

By now, you are probably curious as to what “the death of Sison” in the title means. No, I'm not calling for his death, nor am I hoping that he had pass away soon; in fact, I believe that if he's still alive in spite of his age and his cancer, it must be for some higher purpose. Rather, what I'm referring to here is a literary concept called “the death of the author,” which means that the author's life, beliefs, and intentions when writing his piece should have no bearing whatsoever on the interpretation of his work.

Once an author declares that his opus is done, it is completely out of his hands and should be regarded as an entity unto itself. Therefore, if Sison's poem is a true work of art – and I for one am convinced that it is – it should withstand all sorts of reasonable interpretation, even if the interpretation comes from an angle that he is sure to disagree with.

This, then, is how I read The Guerrilla is Like a Poet:

The comparison cuts both ways, hence the poet is like a guerrilla. And what is a poet, if he is not a writer first? Much like a crafty and sly jungle fighter, a competent writer must be sensitive – not just to his immediate physical reality, but more importantly to the zeitgeist of his own times.

Like a guerrilla who must keep moving and fighting, a writer must keep writing against all difficulties, whether they be deadlines, harsh criticism, undesirable edits, or something as personal yet intensely debilitating as the so-called “writer's block.” And both fighter and writer must not lose sight of their common goal, which is revolution: inasmuch as the fighter struggles for political change, the writer must strive to move his readers in a more personal way that is no less intense.

In my own life, I still get taken aback whenever people tell me they deeply appreciate something I've written, even when it's about something as mundane as cats. Writing in itself has always been one of my great pleasures, and the most I could hope for is that whoever reads my work would take delight in reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

SpongeBob SquarePants took this line of thinking to its logical conclusion when he said that his burgers can't be anything but tasty because he genuinely enjoys cooking them. He must be telling the truth, for St. Therese of Lisieux urges all of us to do small things with great love.

To Chairman Sison, even though we've never met and perhaps never will, I thank you for taking the time off of your struggle to write your poem, and I wish you good health and happiness for the remainder of your days.

May the promise of the New Year prove to be personally fulfilling to one and all!

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