To My Inner Eye

So, there is this book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Pretty much every slightly intellectual young adult has read and been obsessed with this book during some radical transformation, and there are still several parts of that book that I must admit to having appropriated as parts of my own story, my own ever-changing-but-never-really-transforming self-narrative. I won't elaborate all of these little scenes that I have inserted myself into, but I will note one influential idea.

Franz, one of the characters in the novel, lives his life in constant negotiation with an inner eye. I think that is what he calls it anyway. I cannot find my copy of the book to double check on the actual lingo that Kundera uses, but the idea is that Franz always has the image or voice of someone he knows as an internalized judge in his head. Nearly everything he does, he imagines doing under the gaze of Sabina, one of the other characters. Now, I am pretty sure that most people, if you could get them to admit it, also do this to one degree or another, but I do it all the time. The perspective of the inner eye changes, and at various times it has been a christian pastor celebrity, a boy I had a crush on, a teacher, a writer, a new boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, and an elusive acquaintance. Though I may only have a slight guess at the view of this other, and how he would view my actions if he even cared to, (I don't know what it means that this gaze has almost exclusively been male, besides that I am subject to my societal influences despite being aware of them) the internalized perspective of this other never ceases to accompany something that I identify as my own voice.

I am writing all of this because I have moved back to the US and I am no longer abroad. I would like to reserve the right to blather about my own solipsistic brilliant ideas anyway, so I needed a reason to continue to blog. I thought about all of my communication training, and I remember that the most important part of successful communication is to direct your work to a clear audience, never letting them escape your view as you write.

I, quite frankly, do not know who my audience has ended up being, or if I even have one, so I decided to just write to the person who my thoughts are directed anyway: my inner eye. You might notice that this means that the way I direct the story is different in different cases, and this is because my inner eye shifts frequently these days. Don't try to figure out if you are my current inner eye. Chances are, if you read this, you are either too close to me or too distant to be an inner eye, and my inner eye would never read blog posts anyway.

So, the title of the blog will soon change to reflect my geographical change, but I will still tend to write a lot about Denmark because I am in that annoying phase of reverse culture shock that is characterized by the statement, "In Denmark, they..."

My apologies.