My name is Pánfilo de Narváez, and it is clear now that the eye I lost sparring with Cortes in Mexico was perhaps not worth the King’s gift of the title adelantado and the fruitless, doomed trip to the Gulf. But the promise of gold like that of Mexico was far too great a prospect to leave unexplored.

We set out in the summer from San Lucar, Spain with some 600 men and five ships. Stopping in the West Indies to build our reparations, we instead lost two ships in a great storm and I was told there were desertions.

We resumed our journey after the winter, now with five ships, 400 men, and 80 horses. We were met again though, with several great storms, and though it was clear we were set off course from the north shore, I endeavored to salvage our efforts, and set anchor at our first sight of land and claim it for Spain.

Upon sighting land, we anchored in the mouth of a bay, which I called Santa Cruz in the glory and service of our Lord, before progressing inland to a larger bay. I ordered the men to set out on land by foot.  We would get to the North shore one way or another.

My men and beasts were attacked by a sudden onslaught of squarely built Indians, who shot their arrows at us with alarming accuracy. They took the Indian we had taken as a guide.

Through endless swampland, thick vegetation, and towering trees, we kept on North. Looking.

We had no food. The confused beasts did us little good now as transport. In time, we arranged the horses to be slaughtered, for even what little their scare and starving bodies yielded, we could not waste of the precious horseflesh.

We reached a scarcely populated province and, the entire party and expedition devastated, knew there was only one thing to be done. More than a third of our people were gravely ill. We thanked our Lord God when we found an outlet to the sea. There was our chance to escape, and He had delivered us to it through a long and arduous trek.

We resolved to leave this desolate land and escape back into the Gulf, so I ordered the men to fashion vessels in which we might leave. As we pushed off back into those uncertain waters, we knew not what awaited us.

Pool (n.)

The signifier “pool,” is found throughout the narratives of my popcycle. In my family microfiction, the birthday party revolves around a swimming pool, and the ice cream cake melts, pooling around the edges of my paper plate. In my entertainment discourse, the characters of The Land Before Time struggle to free themselves from a tar pit, which my narrative has parsed as a pool of tar. Finally, my community microfictions explore Narvaez’s doomed expedition that began at the Charlotte Harbor; pool, though the word is not used explicitly, is signified by the bay, as well as the outlet to the sea that was use by Narvaez’s men to escape.

The “pool” possesses the shape and form of a vessel in the purest sense, both natural and artificial. It may be concave, accommodating large volumes of fluid, or little more an accumulation of moisture on a surface. Its contents may be crystalline clear water, or thick with mud or tar. It may be as vast as an ocean, or as small as a puddle of rainwater.

Depth versus surface. A vessel for the holy substance of life, or a bowl of the muck of the earth. Reflective or opaque. Stagnant or in tumult.

Cultural understandings of the pool as signifier rest on the trope of a body of water as a baptismal setting (spiritual cleansing through immersion), the metaphoric symbol of the womb or, as in dream analysis, a representation of the states of the unconscious mind.

the sanctity of the pool

a return to the pool

pool of the unconscious

the way things are

How does the universe function?  Its waves, ripples, and rules are seamlessly contained in a world without guarantee of fairness or success.  For all of its uncertainties, being in the world requires a measure of blind faith in human will, agency, and industriousness, however false those assumptions may be, or however certainly you are still driven toward the same mortal end.  Failure looms around every corner.  Murphry’s Law:  Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

All streams lead to…?  Eventual conceit, failure, fault, embarrassment, Hell, the attempted escape, and the prospect of double failure in death.  We are stuck, sinking in that pool; that vessel that brings us back to the womb in death.  Standing in the pool, we look down and watch the distorted reflections of ourselves.

Narvaez’s blundering expedition was damned from the start, but they moved on until they couldn’t any longer.  Sometimes you have to know to when to eat your horses and get the hell out of Dodge, or the Hell of that place will consume you instead. But either way, it’s the same end. The expedition is doomed. We’re all left to brave the sea, not to be ‘borne back ceaselessly’ so much as to be faced with the dilemma of drowning or finding dry land.