A footnote reflection: what is so remarkable about Shakespeare's
Cleopatra, I think I recall, is that "she makes hungry where most she doth
satisfy" (apologies for inaccurate qtn--no bard nearby); part of that
phenom is renewable iterability (??paradoxical, or closed-circular, anyway,
like a Mobius strip), or a satisfaction of desire predictably
repeatable---or, in Prof Godshalk's terms, not yet experienced, but
predictable because previously experienced; and because believed---not
hoped---to be infinitely extensive or extendible into the future. In other
words, Shakespeare makes this quality of "futurity" of desire-satisfaction
an exception, not the rule. (Note the present tense, which implicitly here
covers all tenses, I think---any linguists here to tell us which
indo-european langs include other tense ideas in the present?)
Wow. I have just reread this and found it barely coherent; maybe the kind
members of the list can clean it up for me, at the end of this very, very
long day. This makes me glad not to be teaching A&C this semester! Thanks,
A. Coldiron (normally just a list-lurker)
"W.L. Godshalk" <[log in to unmask]>@mailbase.ac.uk on 10/19/2000
01:37:38 PM
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Subject: Re: future is the tense of desire?
>But if desire is, as Catherine Belsey puts it so succinctly, "the
>experience of lack" the future tense increases that experience in a way
>the demands of the present tense cannot. The "I want it now" may be the
>present tense expression, but the future tense indicates that the
>speaker lives the experience of lack and always lives in expectation and
>tension with a future satisfying of his/ her desire.
writes Frances Batycki.
Perhaps Belsey is wrong. I experience desire most strongly in the presence
of the loved one, not when the loved one is lacked -- or if you will
absent. And, of course, I can be satiated and still desire dessert. You
may read that sentence as metaphor, if you desire.
And, of course, no one is ever satisfied (or desirous) in the future.
Longing for the future may be linked to nostalgia for the past. We still
live and desire and long -- right now, this very now.
Yours, Bill Godshalk
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* W. L. Godshalk
*
* Professor, Department of English *
* University of Cincinnati *
* Cincinnati OH 45221-0069 * Stellar Disorder
* [log in to unmask] *
*
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