Machines and "Empty and Oceanic Thought": Fernando Pessoa’s doing and being of the self

This essay focuses on Pessoa’s philosophy of the being and doing of the self and the connection between machines and the void in thinking, manifested in the poem Ode Triunfal [Triumphal Ode] by the heteronym Álvaro de Campos. Campos’ pensamento oceânico e vazio [“empty and oceanic thought”] is the term I use as the image of the void in human thinking which is found in his poem Épisodios [Episodes]. I look at the interchange of the two verbs for ‘being’ in Portuguese – ser and estar – which Campos explicitly utilizes and connects with each other at the end of a later short prose piece called Ambiente [Environment] in the penultimate sentence: “Estar é ser.”
In the wake of Alberto Caeiro’s nature poetry of the present, Ode Triunfal, alongside Ode Marítima [Maritime Ode], embodies Campos’ contribution to the Zeitgeist of experimental European modernism and the struggle of being and doing that reveals and expresses the schism, gap and link between the two verbal modes of passivity/ activity in human existence and that of the relationship between machines and ‘empty and oceanic thought’ – a vision both philosophical and poetic. The terra incognita of machines which we are a part of, and of our thought as ‘oceanic’ and ‘empty’ is reflected in the oppositions and disintegrating antinomies of Pessoa and Campos in Orpheu and of the links and dichotomies of reality/symbol, human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate and interiority/exteriority. The essay is divided into two sections under the titles: I. 1915, Deaths, Machines, Constructions; and II. Empty and Oceanic Thought and the Affirmative Void of the Self.