THIS IS THE SECOND POST.
THE FIRST POST WAS:
I’M IN A TOWN CALLED NORMAL.
https://mydreamdreamtour.com/2018/11/02/the-dream-dream-tour/
SECOND POST:
THE PROLOGUE WAS IN NORMAL. AND THE ROAD TRIP GETS UNDER WAY.
CLICK ON LINK  OR SCROLL DOWN
View all posts by Jack Klaff
EPISODE TWO
THE PROLOGUE WAS IN NORMAL. AND THE ROAD TRIP GOT UNDER WAY. 
We are visiting these States on the first leg of the tour.More places to come when the tour resumes in early 2019
Recording my impressions, experiences, observations and stories is a  labour of love.
                                   Said to be a poster put out doing the McCarthy era.
Random Observations.
In America ya hardly ever see a pedestrian. I think you’re supposed to hurl abuse at losers who’re walking walk.
Power-striding  doesn’t count.
Of course in the US toilet are called bathrooms.
And in public places, especially where food is served, there is a sign.

Please people, everyone wash your hands.
Advertisements for medicines always have terrifying side-effects.
In Decorah, Iowa, a waitress tells me about a milk stout call Tipping the Cow.

I hear the brand name as Tit of the Cow 
The people at my table and the entire staff of the bar and grille are mightily amused, but  surely this cannot be the first time anyone has called that milk stout Tit of the Cow.
In Whitewater Wisconsin two women who work as cleaners in our hotel check my room number and say to me, ‘If you want, Sir, we can service you now.’
In Rahway, New Jersey, in a railway waiting room a man talking loudly on his cell phone fires an employee who has been working well but is a drug addict. Once the call has ended the people in the waiting room immediately engage in a heated discussion about drugs in South Jersey and how these a kid will shove the needles into every part of the body, even toes.
Our drives are long so we have time to talk. During a discussion about relationships the question comes up: What do you look for in a potential partner. One of the actors says, ‘A hint of desperation’.
In our venue in Wisconsin we were given instructions about what to do in case of fire.
Or an  ‘active shooter’….
Or two different kinds of tornado. Apparently tornados can just happen. No warning. So the theater has a tornado assembly point.

All my own, something I’m writing as I go, uncensored.
Not (yet) edited by anyone else, not (yet) commissioned, frequently angry, uncontrolled, pleasurable and fun, a return to writing for myself.
I’ve been here during the Kavanaugh Hearing.
A woman in my hotel bar in South Bend, Indiana said Kavanaugh’s should be appointed ‘That’s our Constitution.’I’m here during the build-up to the Mid-Term elections.
No explanation. Not convincing. Yet she is convinced.
A man in a printing shop in Iowa talks about the hordes of people on the march towards America from Honduras.
Is he tutting about the way the story is being presented? Or tutting about those dangerous would-be immigrants?
Trump is stirring up fears about the Hondurans suggesting that they are as scary as Mexicans.
Some of them are good people.
But so many of them are drug-dealers and rapists.
Trump and his well-trained Fox broadcasters are adding that these people progressing towards the USH Called by a commentator today: Trump’s Goebbels or Pravda.
A woman who runs an arts venue in Kentucky says that most of the people whom she knows who support Donald Trump do so because they love their guns and believe in the right to bear arms.
She told me that she’s sure a number of her institution’s employees, wandering around her building, are packing heat.                                                  ‘Twas  the week before Hallowe’en.                                         Sign in the rear window of a car. Indiana.                                              In a window in Pinedale, Wyoming.            The barouche in which Abe Lincoln travelled to the theatre, where he was
                   killed. Indiana. Studebaker Museum. Near Notre Dame University.            Mural. Notre Dame University. Near the legendary football stadium.
     The Saviour’s hands are raised. The tradition has built up that the He is triumphant.
                            This painting is irreverently called Touchdown Jesus.    At Menlo Park, site of some of Edison’s early inventions, including the phonograph.
        Look closely at the speaker and you’ll see a sock flopping down from its centre.
                                                           The wool muffles the sound.
                              And that is the origin of the expression Put a sock in it.                                      Juxtaposition of photos. Pure chance.
       The colour on the Presidential faces has not been adjusted. Cloudy, blustery day.                          Right. Sculptor father sculpted by sculptor son. Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
                                                   On a wall in Wall, South Dakota.
We performed Frankenstein in Batavia, Illinois in
a hall at Fermilab, where experiments are conducted involving subatomic particle.
                                                         Fermilab. Batavia, Illinois.
                                 On the wall in a gas station bathroom. Wisconsin.
                              South Dakota certainly has that timeless feel about it.
                           Just before the tour began I became a grandfather.
                     And I’m sure Charlotte Elizabeth Palant will be stylish
Arrived in the US on the 16^th of September 2018
WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK
Our first port of call. Our first shows.
                                                    White Plains, New York.
‘Notable People’ from White Plains include:
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York,
on May 14, 1984
Joseph John Campbell was born in White Plains, New York, 
80 years earlier, on March 26, 1904.
                                                          Mark Zuckerberg                                                                  Joseph Campbell
My tenuous connection with Joseph Campbell?
I had a small role in the original Star Wars movie.
                                                        It’s me. Or one I made earlier.
  A coloured-in version of a black-and-white photograph taken during a break in          filming by Star Wars producer, Gary Kurtz, who died earlier this year, 2018.
The writer and director George Lucas had already written two drafts of Star Wars when he rediscovered Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Lucas had read it in college. Campbell’s blueprint for The Hero’s Journey gave Lucas the focus he needed to weave his sprawling imaginary universe into a single story.
Campbell discovered that in many ways the ‘hero’s journey’ conforms to a common template:
A  ‘hero’ goes on an adventure , experiences a decisive crisis, wins a victory and then comes home transformed.
The Hero starts in The Ordinary World.
This blog started  a town called Normal.
In a diner called Zen.
Apparently the first person to use the term ‘monomyth’ was James Joyce during the 1920s.
By then the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor had, in 1871, published observations of common patterns in the plots of heroes’ journeys. Otto Rank and Lord Raglan had written about narrative patterns in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis and ritualistic senses. Erich Neumann had described the stories of Buddha, Moses, and Christ in terms of the monomyth.
Then, in 1949, came The Hero with a Thousand Faces,  written by Joseph Campbell, who was born in White Plains, New York, where this story began.
                                   The 17 Stages of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth.
In the early 1990s Christopher Vogler, who worked for Disney, published a studio memo and then a book reinterpreting Campbell’s work and cutting the stages down to 12.Needless to say this is not the only kind of structure used in Hollywood.
Any writer today suffers by them all, as producers and script editors try to bludgeon a movie into shape.
William Goldman, the brilliant writer who, coincidentally, passed away just as I was getting ready to post this, famously said that in the movie industry Nobody Knows Anything. 
Of course brilliant movies are still being made.
Excellent TV is still being produced.
Nothing can stop creative human minds from telling stories.
Who knows where these stories will go?
Some people think my trip is loopy. Or at least they’d never embark on such a journey.
Well, Joseph Campbell said Follow your Bliss.
This philosophy derives from the Hindu Upanishads.Campbell also admired the Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt, published in 1922, whose last line resonated with the young Campbell: ‘I have never done a thing that I wanted to do in all my life.’
Once in a restaurant Campbell overheard a father speaking to a woman and a small child, saying:
He can’t go through life doing what he wants to do. If he only does what he wants to do, he’ll be dead. Look at me. I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.’”
Problem was that in the 1970s American layabout students and other youngsters took up the bliss idea, took it to mean good times, lazy pleasure and instant gratification without effort or the kind of struggle and pain that true Heroes endure.
Campbell is reported to have muttered, “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters’.”

    2018. Kansas. This student was kind enough to pose behind his sign looking lost.
It is also the case that Joseph Campbell has been accused of:
Overstating his Sanskrit expertise.
Exaggerating his knowledge of India for his own aggrandizement.
Using his work to celebrate Reaganomics.
Being prejudiced against African Americans and Jews
(See, for example, anecdotal pieces by Russell T. McCutcheon and Brendan Gill.)
Seeping fascist undercurrents into his work. Tim Robey, in 2015, in The Telegraph, remarked that Campbell’s writings and its influence on Star Wars, issued ‘a reminder of how easily totalitarianism can knock at any society’s door.’
This blog was begun two years into Donald Trump’s Presidency.
In the Ordinary World.
In a town called Normal.
In a diner called Zen.
MYTHS
The two plays in which I am appearing are:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 
And Frankenstein.
In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta are about to get married.
They are mythical characters.

Theses is a founder-hero of Athens.
Theseus was conceived when his mom, Aethra, slept with King Aegeus of Athens and the sea god Poseidon in the same night.
Whatever recriminations there might have been, as far as the baby was concerned this meant:
Double paternity, with one Daddy immortal and one Daddy mortal.
A goodly, godly mix of the earthbound and the divine.
The intertwining stories in Greek mythology are complicated and rather overwhelming.
For now, suffice it to say that Theseus was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. 
Like Perseus, Cadmus or Hercules, Theseus had obstacles to overcome and battles to fight, including Six Labours.
But he’s probably best known for the story of the Minotaur
Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos.
She  fell in love with Theseus and, on the advice of Daedalus, gave him a ball of thread  so he could find his way out of the Labyrinth. 
Theseus promised that if he returned from the Labyrinth he would take Ariadne with him.
Theseus followed the instructions.
Theseus came to the heart of the Labyrinth.
There, asleep, was the Minotaur.
The beast awoke.
There was a tremendous fight.
Theseus overpowered the Minotaur.
Theseus stabbed the beast in the throat with his sword.
Or strangled it. In any case the throat was involved.
Theseus cut off the Minotaur’s head.

Then Theseus used Ariadne’s thread and managed to escape the Labyrinth.
And you’d think there’d be a happy ever after but Ariadne was involved with Dionysus. Theseus gave way and was upset of course, stricken, he was stricken, stricken and was thinking only of Ariadne.
Now the sign agreed between Theseus and his father, Aegeus, was:
White sails, I’m alive and fine, Dad, black sails, sorry Dad I’m dead.
Theseus was, you know, so stricken about Ariadne that he forgot to  put up the white sails instead of the black ones. 
Aegeus saw the black signs, believed his son was dead, and committed suicide.
I know. Intense.
Aegeus, grieving for his son, threw himself off a cliff at Sounio and into the sea, thus causing this body of water to be named the Aegean Sea.            
Anyway, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus – perhaps on the rebound, leaving Ariadne to Dionysus – marries Hippolyta, who was Queen of the Amazons.                                                            

Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons

The name Hippolyta comes from Greek roots meaning ‘horse’ and ‘let loose’.
The removal of the girdle of Hippolyta was the Ninth Labour of Hercules. 
You’re welcome to attempt a sort-out of these stories by conducting your own searches.
So far as we and Shakespeare are concerned, Ariadne and Hercules don’t feature in the story of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. 
Some versions say he abducted her.
Some that Hercule did the abducting but gave her to Theseus as spoils.
Others say that she fell in love with Theseus and betrayed the Amazons by leaving with him so willingly.
In some renditions the other Amazons became enraged at the marriage and attacked Athens.
In any case, Hipployta was taken to Athens where she was wed to Theseus.
She was the only Amazon to ever marry.
This play is significant in its portrayal of strong women.
The full title is: Frankenstein Or the Modern Prometheus.
Indeed soon after the writing and publication of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his play about Prometheus.
Disobedience is most important.
Transgression  makes the narrative work.
Adam and Eve had to disobey.
In fairy tales there’s a room you can’t go into.
In horror stories there’s a house you must not approach.
In love stories there’s the one the person you must avoid.
These warnings must be ignored and flouted or the story cannot process
So it was with the Garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve had to disobey.
God wanted them to Grow Up.
And so it was with Prometheus
For stealing fire he was punished
He had a vulture – some say it is an eagle – plucking at his liver for a thousand years. 

But it was worth it.
Don’t you think?
We got fire.
FIRE
New technology
That can burn you to death or cook your food and light your way and warm you.
And of course you know that Prometheus had a brother.
Epimetheus.

And Epimetheus had a female partner:
Pandora.
Aren’t women the worst?
Pandora opened her Jar – or her Box.
And released all the ills of the world. 

          
Pandora and Epimetheus did agree though that something just one thing should be in the box along with all the bad stuff:
Hope

View all posts by Jack Klaff
THIS IS THE SECOND POST.
THE FIRST POST WAS:
I’M IN A TOWN CALLED NORMAL.
CLICK ON LINK just below OR SCROLL DOWN
View all posts by Jack Klaff
EPISODE TWO
THE PROLOGUE WAS IN NORMAL. AND THE ROAD TRIP GOT UNDER WAY. Previously:
Visiting these States on the first leg of the tour.Out of these.
More places to come when the tour resumes in early 2019
Recording my impressions, experiences, observations and stories is a  labour of love.
                                   Said to be a poster put out doing the McCarthy era.
Random Observations.
In America ya hardly ever see a pedestrian. I think you’re supposed to hurl abuse at losers who’re walking walk.
Power-striding  doesn’t count.
Of course in the US toilet are called bathrooms.
And in public places, especially where food is served, there is a sign.

Please people, everyone wash your hands.
Advertisements for medicines always have terrifying side-effects.
In Decorah, Iowa, a waitress tells me about a milk stout call Tipping the Cow.

I hear the brand name as Tit of the Cow 
The people at my table and the entire staff of the bar and grille are mightily amused, but  surely this cannot be the first time anyone has called that milk stout Tit of the Cow.
In Whitewater Wisconsin two women who work as cleaners in our hotel check my room number and say to me, ‘If you want, Sir, we can service you now.’
In Rahway, New Jersey, in a railway waiting room a man talking loudly on his cell phone fires an employee who has been working well but is a drug addict. Once the call has ended the people in the waiting room immediately engage in a heated discussion about drugs in South Jersey and how these a kid will shove the needles into every part of the body, even toes.
Our drives are long so we have time to talk. During a discussion about relationships the question comes up: What do you look for in a potential partner. One of the actors says, ‘A hint of desperation’.
In our venue in Wisconsin we were given instructions about what to do in case of fire.
Or an  ‘active shooter’….
Or two different kinds of tornado. Apparently tornados can just happen. No warning. So the theater has a tornado assembly point.

All my own, something I’m writing as I go, uncensored.
Not (yet) edited by anyone else, not (yet) commissioned, frequently angry, uncontrolled, pleasurable and fun, a return to writing for myself.
I’ve been here during the Kavanaugh Hearing.
A woman in my hotel bar in South Bend, Indiana said Kavanaugh’s should be appointed ‘That’s our Constitution.’I’m here during the build-up to the Mid-Term elections.
No explanation. Not convincing. Yet she is convinced.
A man in a printing shop in Iowa talks about the hordes of people on the march towards America from Honduras.
Is he tutting about the way the story is being presented? Or tutting about those dangerous would-be immigrants?
Trump is stirring up fears about the Hondurans suggesting that they are as scary as Mexicans.
Some of them are good people.
But so many of them are drug-dealers and rapists.
Trump and his well-trained Fox broadcasters are adding that these people progressing towards the USH Called by a commentator today: Trump’s Goebbels or Pravda.
A woman who runs an arts venue in Kentucky says that most of the people whom she knows who support Donald Trump do so because they love their guns and believe in the right to bear arms.
She told me that she’s sure a number of her institution’s employees, wandering around her building, are packing heat.                                                  ‘Twas  the week before Hallowe’en.                                         Sign in the rear window of a car. Indiana.                                              In a window in Pinedale, Wyoming.            The barouche in which Abe Lincoln travelled to the theatre, where he was
                   killed. Indiana. Studebaker Museum. Near Notre Dame University.            Mural. Notre Dame University. Near the legendary football stadium.
     The Saviour’s hands are raised. The tradition has built up that the He is triumphant.
                            This painting is irreverently called Touchdown Jesus.    At Menlo Park, site of some of Edison’s early inventions, including the phonograph.
        Look closely at the speaker and you’ll see a sock flopping down from its centre.
                                                           The wool muffles the sound.
                              And that is the origin of the expression Put a sock in it.                                      Juxtaposition of photos. Pure chance.
       The colour on the Presidential faces has not been adjusted. Cloudy, blustery day.                          Right. Sculptor father sculpted by sculptor son. Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
                                                   On a wall in Wall, South Dakota.
We performed Frankenstein in Batavia, Illinois in
a hall at Fermilab, where experiments are conducted involving subatomic particle.
                                                         Fermilab. Batavia, Illinois.
                                 On the wall in a gas station bathroom. Wisconsin.
                              South Dakota certainly has that timeless feel about it.
                           Just before the tour began I became a grandfather.
                     And I’m sure Charlotte Elizabeth Palant will be stylish
Arrived in the US on the 16^th of September 2018
WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK
Our first port of call. Our first shows.
                                                    White Plains, New York.
‘Notable People’ from White Plains include:
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York,
on May 14, 1984
Joseph John Campbell was born in White Plains, New York, 
80 years earlier, on March 26, 1904.
                                                          Mark Zuckerberg                                                                  Joseph Campbell
My tenuous connection with Joseph Campbell?
I had a small role in the original Star Wars movie.
                                                        It’s me. Or one I made earlier.
  A coloured-in version of a black-and-white photograph taken during a break in          filming by Star Wars producer, Gary Kurtz, who died earlier this year, 2018.
The writer and director George Lucas had already written two drafts of Star Wars when he rediscovered Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Lucas had read it in college. Campbell’s blueprint for The Hero’s Journey gave Lucas the focus he needed to weave his sprawling imaginary universe into a single story.
Campbell discovered that in many ways the ‘hero’s journey’ conforms to a common template:
A  ‘hero’ goes on an adventure , experiences a decisive crisis, wins a victory and then comes home transformed.
The Hero starts in The Ordinary World.
This blog started  a town called Normal.
In a diner called Zen.
Apparently the first person to use the term ‘monomyth’ was James Joyce during the 1920s.
By then the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor had, in 1871, published observations of common patterns in the plots of heroes’ journeys. Otto Rank and Lord Raglan had written about narrative patterns in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis and ritualistic senses. Erich Neumann had described the stories of Buddha, Moses, and Christ in terms of the monomyth.
Then, in 1949, came The Hero with a Thousand Faces,  written by Joseph Campbell, who was born in White Plains, New York, where this story began.
                                   The 17 Stages of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth.
In the early 1990s Christopher Vogler, who worked for Disney, published a studio memo and then a book reinterpreting Campbell’s work and cutting the stages down to 12.Needless to say this is not the only kind of structure used in Hollywood.
Any writer today suffers by them all, as producers and script editors try to bludgeon a movie into shape.
William Goldman, the brilliant writer who, coincidentally, passed away just as I was getting ready to post this, famously said that in the movie industry Nobody Knows Anything. 
Of course brilliant movies are still being made.
Excellent TV is still being produced.
Nothing can stop creative human minds from telling stories.
Who knows where these stories will go?
Some people think my trip is loopy. Or at least they’d never embark on such a journey.
Well, Joseph Campbell said Follow your Bliss.
This philosophy derives from the Hindu Upanishads.Campbell also admired the Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt, published in 1922, whose last line resonated with the young Campbell: ‘I have never done a thing that I wanted to do in all my life.’
Once in a restaurant Campbell overheard a father speaking to a woman and a small child, saying:
He can’t go through life doing what he wants to do. If he only does what he wants to do, he’ll be dead. Look at me. I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.’”
Problem was that in the 1970s American layabout students and other youngsters took up the bliss idea, took it to mean good times, lazy pleasure and instant gratification without effort or the kind of struggle and pain that true Heroes endure.
Campbell is reported to have muttered, “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters’.”

    2018. Kansas. This student was kind enough to pose behind his sign looking lost.
It is also the case that Joseph Campbell has been accused of:
Overstating his Sanskrit expertise.
Exaggerating his knowledge of India for his own aggrandizement.
Using his work to celebrate Reaganomics.
Being prejudiced against African Americans and Jews
(See, for example, anecdotal pieces by Russell T. McCutcheon and Brendan Gill.)
Seeping fascist undercurrents into his work. Tim Robey, in 2015, in The Telegraph, remarked that Campbell’s writings and its influence on Star Wars, issued ‘a reminder of how easily totalitarianism can knock at any society’s door.’
This blog was begun two years into Donald Trump’s Presidency.
In the Ordinary World.
In a town called Normal.
In a diner called Zen.
MYTHS
The two plays in which I am appearing are:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 
And Frankenstein.
In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta are about to get married.
They are mythical characters.

Theses is a founder-hero of Athens.
Theseus was conceived when his mom, Aethra, slept with King Aegeus of Athens and the sea god Poseidon in the same night.
Whatever recriminations there might have been, as far as the baby was concerned this meant:
Double paternity, with one Daddy immortal and one Daddy mortal.
A goodly, godly mix of the earthbound and the divine.
The intertwining stories in Greek mythology are complicated and rather overwhelming.
For now, suffice it to say that Theseus was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. 
Like Perseus, Cadmus or Hercules, Theseus had obstacles to overcome and battles to fight, including Six Labours.
But he’s probably best known for the story of the Minotaur
Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos.
She  fell in love with Theseus and, on the advice of Daedalus, gave him a ball of thread  so he could find his way out of the Labyrinth. 
Theseus promised that if he returned from the Labyrinth he would take Ariadne with him.
Theseus followed the instructions.
Theseus came to the heart of the Labyrinth.
There, asleep, was the Minotaur.
The beast awoke.
There was a tremendous fight.
Theseus overpowered the Minotaur.
Theseus stabbed the beast in the throat with his sword.
Or strangled it. In any case the throat was involved.
Theseus cut off the Minotaur’s head.

Then Theseus used Ariadne’s thread and managed to escape the Labyrinth.
And you’d think there’d be a happy ever after but Ariadne was involved with Dionysus. Theseus gave way and was upset of course, stricken, he was stricken, stricken and was thinking only of Ariadne.
Now the sign agreed between Theseus and his father, Aegeus, was:
White sails, I’m alive and fine, Dad, black sails, sorry Dad I’m dead.
Theseus was, you know, so stricken about Ariadne that he forgot to  put up the white sails instead of the black ones. 
Aegeus saw the black signs, believed his son was dead, and committed suicide.
I know. Intense.
Aegeus, grieving for his son, threw himself off a cliff at Sounio and into the sea, thus causing this body of water to be named the Aegean Sea.            
Anyway, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus – perhaps on the rebound, leaving Ariadne to Dionysus – marries Hippolyta, who was Queen of the Amazons.                                                            

                                    Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons
The name Hippolyta comes from Greek roots meaning ‘horse’ and ‘let loose’.
The removal of the girdle of Hippolyta was the Ninth Labour of Hercules. 
You’re welcome to attempt a sort-out of these stories by conducting your own searches.
So far as we and Shakespeare are concerned, Ariadne and Hercules don’t feature in the story of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. 
Some versions say Theseus abducted Hippolyta.
Some that Hercules did the abducting but gave Hippolyta to Theseus as spoils.
Others say that Hippolyta fell in love with Theseus and betrayed the Amazons by leaving with him so willingly.
In some renditions the other Amazons became enraged at the marriage and attacked Athens.
In any case, Hipployta was taken to Athens where she was wed to Theseus.
She was the only Amazon ever to marry.
This play is significant in its portrayal of strong women.
The full title is: Frankenstein Or the Modern Prometheus.
Indeed soon after the writing and publication of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his play about Prometheus,
Disobedience
Disobedience is most important in stories.
Transgression very often makes the narrative work.
Adam and Eve had to disobey.
In fairy tales there’s a room you can’t go into.
In horror stories there’s a house you must not approach.
In love stories there’s the one the person you must avoid.
These warnings must be ignored and flouted or the story cannot process
So it was with the Garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve had to disobey.
God wanted them to Grow Up.
Prometheus disobeyed.
For stealing fire he was punished
He had a vulture – some say it is an eagle – plucking at his liver for a thousand years. 

But it was worth it.
Don’t you think?
We got fire.
FIRE
New technology
That can burn you to death or cook your food and light your way and warm you.
And of course you know that Prometheus had a brother.
Epimetheus.

And Epimetheus had a female partner:
Pandora.
Aren’t women the worst?
Pandora opened her Jar – or her Box.
And released all the ills of the world. 

          
Pandora and Epimetheus did agree though that something just one thing should be in the box along with all the bad stuff:
Hope