Disability and Illness in Arts-Informed Research: Moving Toward ...

Through her corpse pressed into the sidewalk, the worm joins me.⁸ My heart and thought sink into earth. Heart-thought. Together, the worm and I, we follow imagination, walking and peering into butcher shops where the red interior of our animal bodies is made visible.⁹ Imagination leads me. Watching the vulnerable. Meat once flesh is imagination bled away.

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I am not always certain how to understand my own vulnerability. Is there a best way? The worm doesn't think so. Her underground scrawl inspires the collapse of a hierarchy of “best” ways.

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Ambivalence, poetry, pain, uncertainty, and image seek my companionship. Their arrival assists my creation of a work of poiesis: a work of coming into being via imagination and relationship.¹⁰ Solace is a kinship with another. The compassion of a worm points to the power and strange potential of empathic relationality.

—Coetzee,
as cited in Coetzee, Garber, Singer, Doniger, and Smuts
(1999, p. 35)

Herein I present several of the ways this work has come into being. Others have written words I have met, and they appear to the left, like the quote by Coetzee et al., and the following quote by Hillman.¹¹ Their ideas introduce another perspective that will aid in the reading. There are works of art I have made, and these, too, appear throughout.¹² They present the following and interpretation of sensation. When discursive language fails, or when I fail language, I present my understanding through