{"id":36178,"date":"2016-12-02T19:22:41","date_gmt":"2016-12-03T01:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=36178"},"modified":"2025-10-29T19:10:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T02:10:16","slug":"an-ecstatic-mystical-encounter-with-the-divine-alex-caldieros-who-is-the-dancer-what-is-the-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/an-ecstatic-mystical-encounter-with-the-divine-alex-caldieros-who-is-the-dancer-what-is-the-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"An ecstatic, mystical encounter with the divine: Alex Caldiero\u2019s Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past September, after I came home from a weeklong river trip, a friend told me I needed to read Alex Caldiero\u2019s new book,\u00a0Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance<\/em>(Saltfront, 2016). The book is a facsimile of a poetic journal Caldiero kept on a six-day trip on the Colorado River through Cataract Canyon, in part the same stretch of river that I had just floated. It\u2019s not an exact facsimile \u2013 some of the text is set in type \u2014 but the first thing you see is a drawing of waves on the cover, curling up like plants toward the sun, or perhaps grasping at something, like human hands or the claws of an animal. This river is clearly alive, but its nature is not yet revealed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Caldiero has been around in Utah since the 1980s, and I\u2019ve always thought of him as mainly a performance artist, though he\u2019s hard to categorize. The endnotes call him a \u201cTeacher, polyartist, sonosopher, and scholar of humanities and inter-media\u201d; he calls himself a \u201cwordshaker\u201d; in\u00a0\u201cThe Sonosopher\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(2010), a documentary about Caldiero, filmmaker Trent Harris called him as a \u201cMormon Beatnik poet\u201d; he\u2019s known for unintelligible readings and periodic performances of Allen Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl.\u201d<\/p>\n

That this is a spiritual journey is obvious right away. Like the Bible, Caldiero\u2019s river trip begins on a Monday with the appearance of light:<\/p>\n

\n

So bright a light
\ncan only make
\nme see
\nwhat
\notherwise would
\nbe merely
\nin front of my eyes.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sky and water appear next, and the next few pages are filled with drawings of curling waves and eddies. The journal was written in June, and at that season there must have been cicadas everywhere. On Tuesday, the poem focuses on \u201cthe din of them,\u201d but by Wednesday Caldiero has started to hear the insects as part of a complex soundscape, a holistic voice of the river which is now asking him for a favor:<\/p>\n

\n

The water
\nwants to come
\ninto this page
\nto tell its own
\nstory.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Boaters refer to the glossy \u201cV\u201d of water that enters a rapid as the \u201ctongue,\u201d and Caldiero picks up on the metaphor: \u201cThe tongue of the water speaks out.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0At the beginning of the trip the river is calm with no rapids, and easy to navigate, but on Thursday Caldiero writes, \u201cFlatwater is not why we are here.\u201d Downstream the fearsome rapids of Cataract Canyon await. The serenity of the present moment is temporary, and holds an underlying sense of anticipation and dread as the boaters draw near to the whitewater.<\/p>\n

\n

Fear lifts
\ncloud-like
\nin a clear, clear sky
\na single small cloud
\ndirectly over a mountain
\nthis is what their fear
\nhas come to.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now an illustration shows the tongue of the river with a god-like body, the river flowing from its mouth. The river has become a pagan idol, and Caldiero pokes fun at it,<\/p>\n

\n

The Rivers\u2019 sound
\nis not a ROAR,
\nbut very much like an
\nair conditioning unit.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But then, encountering the full force of whitewater, Caldiero writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Am finding that there
\nis more to this than
\nmeets the oar, and that
\nis that each portion
\nof movement called
\na wave is as much
\nalive by its very curve
\n& shape as any other life
\nform.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Finally, Caldiero rejects his anthropomorphic image of the River\/God entirely. His journey down the river has become an ecstatic, mystical encounter with the divine, a literal baptism, but definitely not an encounter with the kind of God who created mankind in his own image:<\/p>\n

\n

Don\u2019t dare call
\nriver
\nit
\ndon\u2019t dare call
\nriver he or she
\nor we or whatever
\nsmells of the human.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The work is strongly reminiscent of Sufi mystical poetry and Caldiero knows it. He ends his journey resting at home on Sunday with a verse re-translated from Rumi,<\/p>\n

\n

O Water of Life, who can think of death?
\nYou\u2019ve made me an Ever Living Green Being.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So my friend was right. I absolutely loved this book. Like so many other people, I organize my life around river trips, not just for recreational fun but because being on the water touches something deeply spiritual. Caldiero has put this feeling into a book. As he writes, \u201cON RETURNING\/ part of me never returns.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance?<\/em>
\nAlex Caldiero
\nsaltfront: studies in human habit(at)\u00a0
\n2016, 93p.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past September, after I came home from a weeklong river trip, a friend told me I needed to read Alex Caldiero\u2019s new book,\u00a0Who is the Dancer, What is the Dance(Saltfront, 2016). The book is a facsimile of a poetic journal Caldiero kept on a six-day trip on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1518,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[2412,1784],"class_list":["post-36178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-bytes","tag-alex-caldiero","tag-saltfront"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-23 15:51:37","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36178"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97508,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36178\/revisions\/97508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}