I'm off to New Zealand for 2 weeks holiday. You can follow the progress on junk for code. In the meantime we have David Harvey on desire and memory:

My favourite line from Balzac is “hope is a memory that desires” and that was how I wrote Spaces of Hope, around that idea. Everybody has a memory, but memory can become nostalgia when it’s left on its own; nostalgia is not hope. Hope is memory that’s mobilized around desire. So the question is what do we desire and how do we want to desire it? For me, that is the crucial aspect of everything we do. So if I focus on Balzac, to whom I return again and again, I might conclude, “wow, yeah, that’s what’s it about, I desire things, but I can not do this absent of the memory.” As Walter Benjamin says about memory, “memory is not history, its something that flashes up, in moments of danger,” it somehow or other animates things.