Blog 7: Cybil as a motherly character in the game Silent Hill

[This will be my late post for the semester.]

As a foil to Dahlia Gillespie, the character of the police officer Cybil Bennett is a vehicle of benevolent motherhood throughout the game's plot. From the beginning, Cybil vows to be an active part in Harry's search for his daughter. In one of the moments that decides the game's ending, Cybil has just agreed to go alone to the Amusement Park on Dahlia's strange warning that she must get there before Alessa does. As Harry, the player must travel to the park to find her, and upon doing so she appears glassy-eyed and drugged and stands up to aim her gun at Harry, triggering a boss fight. Stripped of her character, Cybil becomes one of the many forces assailing the father in his search for his daughter: another monster. At this point, the player may choose to use the “red liquid” on her, triggering a cut-scene in which Cybil keels over and vomits a worm-like, seemingly parasitic embryo. Now purged of this creature, Cybil is conscious again. As Harry acts as an impediment to Dahlia's “plans,” the turning of Cybil against him creates not only adversity but insult; a character who has consistently devoted herself to the search for an endangered child is not only negated but reversed in intention, suddenly a danger to Cheryl's last hope of being rescued from the hell-world of Silent Hill and Dahlia's obscure plots. Her possession is represented by a parasite, which draws intriguing connections between the motivating forces of the monster-Cybil and that of the plot's ultimate evil-doer: Dahlia Gillespie, acting ferociously on her religious devotions to the point that she abandons her compassionate instincts as a mother. One can further examine the physical similarities between the parasite that possesses Cybil and the wriggling growths on the backs of the possessed nurses in the hospital; the hospital was a key part in hiding the terrible abuse Dahlia exerted on her daughter as part of her “plan.”

If Cybil is saved rather than killed, the player is treated to a cut-scene in which Harry explains to her that he is not Cheryl's biological father, but took her as his daughter when he and his late wife found her on the side of the road. He concludes that he will not give up his search for her, and Cybil promises to help him until the end. Perhaps one of the most powerful details pertaining to these characters' sense of parenthood is the unconditional treatment they give it; their parenthood is undefined by genetics, whereas Dahlia's seems only to be a condition of genetics. In Cybil's case, the lack of condition is even stronger, as she has never even met Cheryl, yet gives motherly devotion to saving her life. Here is a concrete point of distinction between the motherly archetype of Cybil and that of Dahlia, who is Alessa's biological mother.

Week 6: Bitchin' and bellyachin' about poetry

Reading most of the new contemporary translations of the poems "Poet in New York" ("Poeta en Nueva York") by Frederico Garcia Lorca, one would hardly assume they were all about New York. That's the ultimate power of poetry, the sincere manipulation of reality, which is often forgotten in learning about the gritty mechanics of sonics, meter, diction, and imagery.

The community at the Poetry Free-For-All likes to teach that a poem is not good because of its subject, and because they're so intent on their method of "tough love" in training inexperienced poets (which is more like "condescending discouragement"), this rule is stressed to the point where the subject and atmosphere of a poem are inadvertently pushed to the background by all the things real poets do, such as imagery, elegant lists of household objects, and the mentioning of flowers most people haven't heard of.

Not to say the poetry published in today's most prestigious magazines isn't skilled. But what is skill if it's nothing to read? Look at the poem "Soundings" by Robert Wrigley, a poem randomly selected from Poetry Magazine: The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired / to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post / of the shack. Very fluid and exact description of a birdhouse. But two and a half lines were just expended on a description of how a birdhouse is hanging from a shack, an amount of detail of questionable importance to the poem.

Who would read this poem? Not even old people would read this poem. Old poets would. It's not up to anyone but Robert Wrigley to criticize who Robert Wrigley chooses to write for, but poems such as this fit the standard of what Poetry and the other most prestigious publishers of English poetry publish. The most esteemed contemporary poets sound nothing like this. Ted Hughes is sharp, atmospheric, poignant, and, most importantly, adored by the poetic community. Billy Collins is simple, fluid, and ponderous and he's one of the most popular poets alive today. So why, when new poetry must be published, is there a lack of, or even a rejection of, poetry that pushes boundaries?

This post really isn't meant to conclude anything, but to finish off, Lorca can be brought back into focus. In "Poet in New York," Lorca creates a body of poetry that culminates into its own grim, breathtaking, and inherently mysterious atmosphere. Great Depression-age New York is transformed into several images of Hell. Not only the general tone, atmosphere, and imagery have this power, but the language itself. Stumbling onto my face, different every day. / Murdered by the sky! he writes in "Back from a Walk." In "Dawn," he writes Dawn in New York / has four columns of filth / and a hurricane of black doves / splashing in putrid waters. He brushes the edge of sensationalism but has already characterized a dirty setting in four lines.

Lorca takes the real and morphs it into his emotions. He creates a universe through verse. And his words get to the damn point instead of lingering over their own sense of significance. What one can question is why poetry is not encouraged to be more like this: clear and emotionally moving rather than built on its own obsession with the craft. To quote Nietzsche, "Deep people strive for clarity; people who wish to appear deep strive for obscurity."

Week 5: the time I got lost downstream on the Au Sable

Jamie, Casey, Cody and I all ended up in a stranger's truck, shivering in our bathing suits, our tubes lying in the back. He immediately knew who were as he stopped the vehicle in the middle of the path; "There are a lot of people looking for you right now," he said out his window, observing our half-naked and shoeless bodies shivering in the headlights.

Before this we were making a choice between two options: we could start a fire and try to warm ourselves and sleep on the stone floor of the monumental chapel by the riverside, or we could start a walk down the dirt path in the woods and hope we took the right turns and found someone to help us. The sun had finally finished setting just a few minutes after we pulled ourselves onto the tiny dock, quaking with cold, and lay our tubes against a tree.

I can't really recall ever being as relieved as when we spotted that dock. Turning another of perhaps hundreds of bends, the silent brown thing defined itself as we drew nearer. It was silent, still, and completely modest, jutting just a few feet into the water. Even though all four of us knew what we had come across, all of us began to announce it: "There's a dock right there! There's a dock!"

At that moment, I didn't even think that perhaps it had been extreme for me to slurp all that river-water out of my hands in the few hours preceding. But I didn't know when we would find a dock, or anything hopeful. Cody had begun saying things like, "Our parents will never see us again." I just responded with, "Keep going..." My arms were exhausted. For some reason, we all insisted on fiercely paddling ourselves downstream, and had been doing so for hours. As I looked to the darkening sky, I had a grave thought about how far back from here we would be if we hadn't been doing so.

The despair had set in at some point after a few hours of this, a couple dozen river-bends later, completely pure of anything human. I think it began its swell when Jamie, the most stubborn of us, finally gave up her certainty. "I don't know where we are," she said, smiling and shaking her head. "We're fucking lost."

I wished she had said that an hour earlier, when we actually came to a dock next to a little nature trail marked by a "you are here [on the river]" map. This was after a decent distance of wilderness, during which Jamie assumed the get-off point would be coming any time. Casey, Cody, and I ran out of the water up the path and read the sign, looked around, and wondered if we should go find someone to help. Jamie insisted we were to keep going; she was tired and wanted to get back. Still drunk, unlike the three of us, she kept floating carelessly down the river, and as she disappeared around the bend we figured we'd better catch up to her and ran back down to our tubes. I was already shivering and getting weak from hunger.

Until then we had just been apprehensive. Jamie would tell me later that I had been pissing her off with my constant worried questions of whether she was sure we didn't pass the get-off point. We had passed the blue bridge beside the road... Maybe that was it? There were no more houses on the riverbank like there had been for hours before. Just trees, and the river was getting wilder, with woody debris lying freely in the middle of it.

In fact, I remember the last house we passed. There was a lady in her backyard and Jamie asked her where the next bridge was (we knew the get-off point was a bridge). "Oh, not for miles..." The lady said, and watched, confused, as we continued downstream, until her little brown house disappeared from our view around another bend.