convinced

Last week I had students in one of my classes watch Sound of Metal, a scripted feature film about hearing loss, cochlear implants, sobriety, embodiment, grasping and limits, and so much else. It’s beautifully written and performed, and it followed readings that included Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society.

The first student to speak up about the film was J, who said: I’m not sure if this is the right way to say it, but I was…convinced by the movie. J thought this response was likely inadequate, but I assured him that any writers of fiction would be very pleased by that choice of words. They’d be thrilled to know he was convinced that the world of the film or book existed, convinced that these characters moved through it, that they were recognizably human, convinced by the dream state of taking on those characters’ idiosyncracies and questions as though they were our own.

I spend a lot of time reading the arguments of my nonfiction writer friends and admirees — peers in policy, academia, journalism — and I am plenty often convinced by them in the usual way. I am convinced by their logic and by their evidentiary appeals. I desperately need that persuasion as nourishment, and I seek out minds much sharper and more skilled than my own. I need a steady diet of their ideas to think with. I’m acutely aware of my limitations.

But I don’t really long to join these writers in that kind of persuasion, to have that form of something to say. I said this a while ago — I want to make art, not arguments — and when J said this thing about being convinced, I recognized it again. I want to be convincing about what it feels like to be a human being.