Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain (review)

Sharon Cameron. Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. vi + 121 pp. Clothbound, $18.95.

According to Buddhist doctrine, all existence is suffering; to transcend the suffering that is our birthright, we must achieve a radical liberation from desire. Invoking this teaching, Anna, the fictional narrator of Sharon Cameron's Beautiful Work, draws a distinction between suffering and pain: "Pain is inevitable, but suffering is not. Suffering arises when I fight the world's lawfulness, the dharma. When I desire things to arise differently from how they do arise, there is suffering. When I desire that things which are not pass away, there is suffering" (p. 22). The "beautiful work" undertaken by Anna is a meditation on pain; the goal of that meditation is to arrive at a point where pain can be accepted for what it is, purged of consolatory myths, proprietary dramas, and masochistic attachments.

The reader of Beautiful Work is denied many of the usual pleasures of the text; Cameron--Kenan Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and author of studies on Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--is less interested in suspending our disbelief than in creating a written representation of meditation. Readers are not given a fully developed character in Anna, nor a fully developed plot. Not enough information is given to attach a story to the suffering that leads Anna to undertake her three retreats; whether the pain she is struggling with is physical or psychological in origin is unclear. But if Cameron's sketchiness in terms of plot and character is experienced as a source of frustration, readers are also asked to examine their own desire for a more detailed story. By withholding the history of Anna's pain, Cameron draws attention to the inner logic of Anna's meditation, reminding us that the work of meditation depends on freeing pain from the narratives we attach to it and simply observing it as a form of heat or intensity that ebbs and flows, coming and going, like breath itself.

Although Cameron makes us question our own appetite for plot and story, she doesn't ask us to do without the pleasure of poetic language, which she uses freely throughout the text, not only in the dream sequences and memories that surface regularly but even in Anna's scrupulous documentation of her own sensations while meditating. The dream sequences and memories have a drama and pathos of their own, elements that are tolerated within the text, just as they might be tolerated within a meditation, rising up and fading away without being allowed to dominate. To create the written equivalent of a meditation on pain, Cameron must make Anna's pain vivid, and one of her chief means of doing this is through poetic description. Thus, in a passage in which Anna experiences death as a constantly ongoing process, she notes:

"I am watching a relentless streaming. There's no relief. The streaming pulls everything into it. Out of it everything comes. There is just awareness and this vast streaming out of which pressure, moisture, heat, pulsing manifest themselves briefly. Feeling too. Sadness lasts one mind-moment. Then it disappears back into the undifferentiated, seamless streaming.

"This force is bright, cold, hard, immaculate. It is irreproachable. It isn't only violent. It is also pure, innocent, blameless." (P. 115)

The dominant note of such passages is at once astonished and impersonal, evoking a reality that is greater than the speaker.

The final ambition of Cameron's poetic and antinarrative approach is not literary but therapeutic. In order to find our way into the text and to qualify for the kind of healing that it proposes, we must, after all, make a leap of faith; we must allow ourselves to be persuaded that it isn't pain itself but the stories we attach to pain that make it so difficult for us...