| Chapter 1: | Three Hundred and Forty-Nine Words |
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Three Hundred
and Forty-nine Words1
Poetic, fictional, aesthetic. This is an arts-informed inquiry where words and images participate with imagination to exhibit an embodied narrative of disability, an account still largely unwritten.2
It is a story that believes humans and the other-than-human are in constant touch with, constantly being touched by the world. It is a story that came into being through the presence of love and a belief that loving words and colours—sensations—are where knowing has its beginnings.
Rose has her beginnings within this text. Her story is an embodied narrative of disability. Here, she becomes a witness to her own life, to life, to breathing, that in and out of rising and falling. She knows this telling deepens narrative imagination and empathic presence in the world.
Rose's scarred body, the site of this narrative, is quiet and resistant to the codes of traditional academic discourse. She arrives at her own being, dys-body,3 after following a rather insistent and visceral sensation, an impression she provisionally translates as vulnerability. She arrives after meeting worms on sidewalks, hearts wrapped in plastic, and fallen petals. Part of her work is to think seriously about what exists on the periphery of consciousness and is not represented, to reveal (revel in) the