I’m not sure how I first came to Constance DeJong’s work but I remember the lead-up: Modern Love hadn’t yet been re-issued so I booked myself an afternoon at the Fales Collection archive (so luxurious to imagine now, with the libraries closed…), and wrested some precious hours from whatever other urgencies pressed on, to pore over Lucy Amarillo, Modern Love, and anything else of hers I could get my hands on. I was preparing for our first encounter: a “reading” I invited Constance to give at the Segue Reading Series (was it Spring 2016)? Of course, as I had yet to learn and would soon discover, Constance doesn’t read so much as channel, like a bard trafficking in memory as a medium.

It’s 2020 and hard to imagine ever not knowing Constance. Curious about what that might have looked like I returned to the introduction I wrote for her in 2016:

In Modern Love, Constance writes: “I’m after a total effect, wanting to see how it all fits together.” I carried this sentence with me as I read along, held the sensation of total effect as I watched her perform the text in a grainy black and white video shot in 1978 at Western Front in Vancouver. She recites from the book fluidly, from memory: the narrative travels through a circuit of encoded inflections, affects, and cues even the most perspicacious of listeners might only begin to unravel. I imagine the Yatesian palace erected to commit names, sentences, events and dialogues to memory—or did she even need to? In a 2003 interview with Tony Oursler, she writes: “I always said I’m just an instrument; I’m transparent, like a medium, the language passes through me. Which is a bit like saying I’m a recording device…I had a real connection to ongoing, language production in real time.”

Constance’s writing and performance explodes and exploits the sentencing of language: its shifting materiality, syntax, and semiotics and its communicability in real time, in the present time allotted to performing. A sentence as the time that language takes.

She writes: “Here’s the story. I’m in my room. It’s a long sentence: I sit, I stand, I drift back and forth between these walls, flitting over the floor boards, wearing myself to a shadow, comparing myself to the flickering gleams on the ceiling the walls, attempting to merge with the background, trying to become anonymous, hoping to stay forever in the total freedom of obscurity, I’m imprisoned, dreaming hard. This goes on for seven years. It was a long sentence.”

Turning back to this last passage, which had struck me already then, I witness it transforming, gaining with this new reading a bewildering relevance as I contemplate containment within the walls of my apartment and try to dream myself out of it for days on end. How to tell a story about time when we’re caught up in this long present? Constance’s capacious writing and brilliant, mnemonic enactments show us the way.

Rachel Valinsky, May 2020
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