Memoirs of a Minotaur: Adventures Among the Powerful & Gifted from Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst

This memoir by Robin Magowan offers not just a chronology of self-formation for the Merrill Lynch heir to the fundaments of capital-building and sexual excess. At its core is a poetic quest for language and vision, a text written and formed in "the visionary company of love" which would include Rimbaud, Whitman, F Scott Fitzgerald, and Henri Michaux. The "labyrinth" the self is entangled in is the excess of wealth and business nexus, the solipsism of sexual need and self-consciousness, the social determinations of class and culture that are never fully voided. But the mentor figures in the book are, oddly enough, James Merrill as delicate social force and trainer of agape, and Nancy Ling Perry as the militant apocalypse of drugs, revolutionary ideology, rage, bliss, and death. Somewhere between these two voices, lost in the heights of Tibet and clarity of meditative consciosness and restraint, Robin Magowan finds a new self and reveals much about the American capitalist self in the process. This is a wondrous book caputuring the 1960s at its visionary and crazy core, and moving out of the conformist 1950s into something better. It is a poetic quest worthy of a great soul, written with courage, lucidity, and need. A drunken boat casting its waves from Merrill Lynch to Dante and ordinary selfhood. A prayer of "crack up" like Fitzgerald's uttered in the micro-cracks, woundings, and megatrends of capital gone inward into self-abolishment and the quest for vision.