Clouds as chaos machines

Abstract

In the present essay, I explore the status of clouds in the lyric and epic poetry of early modern Portuguese poet, Luís Vaz de Camões (1524?–1580). Through a close reading of the elegy “O poeta Simónides, falando” (The poet Simonides, speaking) and the Adamastor episode in canto five of Os Lusíadas (1572), I analyze Camões’s poetic rendering of clouds and storms at the Cape of Good Hope and their connection to sixteenth-century theories of the “machine of the world.” To flesh out these theories, I explore more contemporary poetic work on clouds, sponges, and nets. Finally, I build on the account of “desiring machines” found at the beginning of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia to link Camões’s account of Cape storms to broader notions of machines, desire, empire, and human experience.