"So misunderstood, but what's the world without enigma?" he asks on "6 Foot 7 Foot," setting himself up for a chance at self-excavation.
For Grey, it was a chance to express some part of himself onstage that he hadn't yet come to terms with in life: a cathartic, if contradictory, act of self-excavation.
Three actors - two women and a man - sit under a vast tilted mirror in Jeremy Herbert's spare, beautiful design and explore the rage, pain, turbulence and self-excavation that leads to suicide.
They were finely etched traceries of grief and self-exploration, excavations of what had been lost in his journey as a self-described "scholarship boy" toward the highly educated and, at times, strangely alienated scholar and writer he would become -- stranded between the strict family who no longer understood him and the elite campus culture to which he had not been born.
The result is an inordinately satisfying essay in self-criticism, an excavation of roots followed by a chronicle of labor.
It is only because Mr. Clinton was president of the United States that these excavations of self -- a staple of celebrity and noncelebrity memoirs these days -- are considered newsworthy.
One might say that Lively's book is itself a product of another era, a time when novelists and poets wrote reminiscences, not memoirs, and offered elegiac tours of a lost social landscape rather than deeply revelatory excavations of self or family.
Modernity has mostly stripped the site of all those layers of history to recover a Periclean-era past that represents, because it has come to mean the most to us, its supposed true self — a process of archeological excavation, based on another modern kind of fiction about historical and scientific objectivity that inevitably adds its own layer of history.
As he forges forth into his self-described "journey of deep excavation into the world of abstract ideas," Ridgway moves his designs into a mesmerizing geometric matrix.
What her film lacks in precise moral focus and deeper mental excavation it makes up for in interestingly debatable ambiguities and self-doubt.
The Great Dismal Swamp, a few days' walk at most from the Chowan River excavation, was long a destination for escaped slaves, who formed self-reliant communities in its inaccessible reaches.
