Three things from DAH. The There There: Where the heart is.

DAH is me, David Anthony Hance. 
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First up this week: Undercut … 
It's no fun to be undercut. Most of us have experienced it. Everything seems to be flowing nicely, or at least within our control. Suddenly and usually surprisingly we're cut off at the knees and some other (thing or being) has taken control. Sometimes we can bounce back up and retake control, or the illusion thereof. Sometimes we're left fallen on the field, feeling dazed, damaged, and distressed. It might be useful to figure out why you've been undercut. I've wasted too much time on that. Better to focus on what you have going for you: the skills, knowledge, and values that made you feel un-undercuttable. Get back to what you know you can do well, and do that even better. 
 
Second up this week, Undertake …
A quest? Like one of the knights at King Arthur's round table. A vow is made to undertake. One could undertake to toast bread for breakfast. Or one could undertake to locate that lost electronic device. Those don't really qualify as quests, do they? And an undertaking does feel serious, like vowing and questing. Reading Stalking Shakespeare (see below) sucked me into the author's quest. So close to madness, he was, undertaking to find a true life portrait of the Bard of Avon. I want to take care with any undertakings I vow to. A noble quest could be good, but madness is just mad.
 
Third up this week, Underwater …
I'm pondering ungulates. I saw a photo spread of a camel market in The Guardian. It made me think about my friend Rosemary's travel to Camel Camp. And then I was underwater. Not literally, but mentally. I lost myself, lost the plot thread, and almost (but not quite) slipped down a rabbit hole into the sea of tears below. Now I've stopped pondering ungulates. I need to get out from underwater, in more ways than I can readily explain. There's a real joy in breaking the surface after being underwater. Taking that first breath, looking about, and deciding how to proceed without drowning in silliness. Always a danger for DAH: drowning in silliness.

A book about Shakespeare, but not much about the plays or sonnets ...
Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint, by Lee Durkee
Lee Durkee got interested in Elizabethan miniature portraits. Then he went gently mad searching for a "real life" portrait of William Shakespeare. Short chapters (yay!) and and a hyperbolic, zigzaggy writing style kept me on my toes, and relentlessly reading until the book was done. The second half has a little bit about Shakespeare authorship. Durkee seems an Oxfordian, at first (someone who believes that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford). But then he veers, just as he does with his portrait evaluations. He ends up in the "I don't know who wrote Shakespeare but I know it wasn't Shakespeare" camp, which is an amusingly unspecific landing place. This book arrived on the same day as Chris Laoutaris's Shakespeare's Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare … that one's going to be a dryer reading appointment. 

And a bit more: 

"Like The Water"
by Wendell Berry 

Like the water
of a deep stream,
love is always too much.
We did not make it.
Though we drink till we burst,
we cannot have it all,
or want it all.
In its abundance
it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill,
and sleep,
while it flows
through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us,
except we keep returning to its rich waters
thirsty.

We enter,
willing to die,
into the commonwealth of its joy.


And that's all for this week.
From Mary Oliver's "Sometimes"