TRACY DUBIN, MA

I am a cultural critic, writing academic essays and scientific research publications mostly on philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, and comparative literature. It is a life of books+screens+interpretation. I am also an Addiction Science Researcher, affiliated with the Medical University of South Carolina, and I am currently in their Clinical and Translational Research Ethics Fellowship Program. You can always find me presenting my work somewhere. When you cannot, it is probably because I am busy being a suicide/crisis counselor and working in various other divisions of healthcare. And sometimes, I write poems. I hold an MA from the University of California at Irvine, a BS and BA from the University of Southern California; and hopefully, soon a doctorate. Feel free to email me at TDubin2170@aol.com with comments, criticisms, and witticisms. I love interacting with people and hearing their stories.

And, if it is not already evident from my art, I am perpetual romantic at heart. Wish me luck.

Knight of Faith
(Photograph, 96 dpi, 2268 x 4032 px)

Lacking fear and trembling in repetition, Søren Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith professes his undying love for the princess, as he believes that in this world, in this life, they will be together. Their love is realistically fated for failure: with every profession, she ignores him; there is no redemption and only remembrance of what he once did. But the Knight of Faith persists, loving his princess perpetually – she will always have his heart. Time sees their red string is not connected, that they die without each other, that his princess never leaves her prince to be with the Knight. She is taken and chained to another, though he does not love her; the Knight of Faith does. So, the Knight keeps trying, having eternal faith that he will get her – by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that through God, everything is possible.

In present day, in Edward-Hopper picturesque, the Knight declares his undying love on a dying theater the pandemic killed. We do not know if his beloved, Rachel, will ever see his midnight plea. We hope she does; but, we imagine she walks past, into the future, forgetting him forever. What remains is an American neon that is not even fully lit. It fades, as love often fizzles into murk.

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I took this photo during the sweaty month of August, while wandering alone on King Street in Charleston, South Carolina. I was there working as an Addiction Science Research Fellow in the Medical University of South Carolina’s Institute of Psychiatry. I was researching in their Brain Stimulation Lab.

The mind can play tricks upon us all: we can be over-zealous, painstakingly confident Knights of Faith who refuse rejection, succumbing to the neurochemical con job of love. However, there is no harm in that, in placing faith in the impossible if it instills hope within your soul. Reasons to believe drive humanity – yet, the paradox is successfully etching dreams into existence.

Like the Knight of Faith and this luminescent-theater-billboard writer, I too was having my own personal love problems over the summer. May mine, and everyone else’s, dissipate into a darkness that brings new therapeutic light.

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