Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain

by Sharon Cameron

The stories one tells about pain are profound ones. Nothing is more legible than these stories. But something is left out of them. If there were no stories, there might be a moment of innocence. A moment before the burden of the stories and their perceived causes and consequences. For Anna, the narrator of Beautiful Work , there were moments when it was not accurate to say in relation to pain "because of this‚" or "leading to that." They were lucid moments. And so she began to hunger for storylessness.
In order to understand the nature of pain, Anna undertakes a meditation practice. We tend to think of pain as self-absorbing and exclusively our own ("my pain," "I am in pain"). In distinction, Sharon Cameron’s Anna comes to explore pain as common property, and as the basis for a radically reconceived selfhood. Resisting the limitations of memoir, Beautiful Work speaks from experience and simultaneously releases it from the closed shell of personal ownership. Outside of the not quite inevitable stories we tell about it, experience is less protected, less compromised, and more vivid than could be supposed.
Beautiful Work brings to bear the same interest in consciousness and intersubjectivity that characterizes Cameron’s other work.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published May 19, 2000

About the author

Sharon Cameron teaches nineteenth-century American literature and twentieth-century American poetry. She received her Ph.D. at Brandeis University, and has taught at Boston University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins, where she has been the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English since 1985. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[W.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book a very slow-go at first, picking it up and putting it down repeatedly and not feeling any accretive force from the cumulus of readings. Then I decided we weren't going to get along on a sequential basis, this book and I. So I started jumping around and the book suddenly worked so much better for me.

Books that discourage sequentiality are friends to certain days. Sometimes these are poetry, photography books without text, artists' books, wallets, napkins. Maybe even certain people should be approached and "read" this way, against sequentiality. We tend to want to press people into chronological narratives like Emily Dickinson flowers. Maybe it's better sometimes to see a person (or a book) as a series of explosions happening simultaneously in different time regions. We lack the proper software to experience the person's past, present and future at once, so we must make compromises and take little slices, little samples, of the person. So it is with some books.

I came to believe that by slicing text like sashimi, jumping around, I began to better comprehend the author's primary theme, which seems to be the dismantling of her mind and its software (on which pain is running). The book is subtitled A Meditation on Pain. and I wasn't sure at first which "pain" (of the ten thousand plus) we were talking about. As the book went on, the spiritual struggle is what became real. This meant that the world itself became irreal then unreal. Nothing is the new new.

This is a book written in a manner that puts normal reading strategies off. The prose starts to flicker after a while and you wonder whether you should change a light bulb. And then you realize you are the flickering bulb. And then you let the bulb go out periodically and you can see in the dark. And you think, this darkness is so nice, why didn't I try seeing in this before?

Some samples:

"It may be you will spend your lifetime in a room like this one. I can't tell. It may be you are done with rooms."

"Speaking helps me see pain isn't owned."

"Margot begins to dream. I'm horrified. I can see into her dream. We are in the room with the dying animal. There is a lake in the room."

"This morning for three hours I didn't move. I watched space. There were no objects in the space. There was space. There was knowing of space."

"I see the breast bone is broken. The rib cage is turned outward to the world."

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

lyrical, evocative and moving. between moments of brilliant lucidity the opacity of the prose frustrated me. and just when I was getting fed up the ending came along with startling force and really tied everything together in a way that felt rewarding and well earned. I loved it