The Mortals(Staff Website)
Mortals Spring 2025 Submission Guide
Theme: Bull’s-eye
Introductory Essay: Strike
Albert Wang
To aim for the bull’s-eye is to engage with the most elusive of targets humans can imagine: precision, clarity, and an irrefutable sense of purpose somehow stuffed into a perfect circle encased with concentric aspirations.
The bull’s-eye reflects in its iris a narrative of accomplishment. Millennials back, warriors and hunters sought their quarry’s heart not to merely sustain life, but to consecrate skill and ritual. Achilles’ spear found the fatal flaw of Hector’s armor, Qing Shihuang’s army broke the walls of cities of six states. Every perfect strike carries its shadow; Hector’s fall set Troy aflame, Shihuang’s death tore legalism apart. To hit the mark, then, is to invite scrutiny of its consequences. What, precisely, do we achieve by striking true?
The bull’s-eye seduces with its promise of mastery. Robin Hood’s arrow splitting another in twain carves out in the bull a legend of defiance and prowess, a folk hero’s triumph over authority and mediocrity alike. In the pursuit of perfection, societies graze bulls for their eyes as measures of greatness. The Pythagorean devotion to mathematical harmony became the nuts and bolts of Parthenon’s design, where every column and angle prayed to the sacred geometry of order. Gothic cathedrals pierced heaven itself with their pointed arches, their spires an aspiration as much as an achievement. But even these architectural triumphs betray the cost of their perfection. The workers and laborers – enslaved, coerced, free, voluntary – who raised these edifices seldom found themselves housed in their rooms, memorialized in stained glass, or inscribed upon cornerstones. Their toil was as invisible as it was indispensable, erased, disinfected, sterilized from the narrative of the bull’s eye to uphold its gleaming, sanitized, translucent symmetry.
And what of those for whom the bull’s eye is imposed rather than chosen? For centuries, the colonial enterprise operated within the lens and retina of its own bull’s eye: the civilizing mission. The narrative of the mission rewrote the history and cultures of entire continents into targets for conquest, their cultures and lands reduced to concentric rings of resource extraction, conversion, and exploitation. The colonizers’ precision was devastating; their aim justified by an ideology that mistook dominance for destiny.
Today, the corporate bull’s eye mirrors colonial impulses under the guise of optimization’s ranch. Algorithms, those modern archers of efficiency, aim with mechanical precision at consumer behavior and household psychology, predicting desires before they are formed. Targeted advertising and AI-powered recommendation algorithms render the individual into data points in vector fields that graze their identity, distilling their existence into patterns to be manipulated. In this digital panopticon, the bull’s eye is no longer a mark of aspiration but a symbol of attention capture, the acme of entrapment.
The bull’s-eye is a promise and a trap. To aim for it is to pursue clarity and control, to distill the chaotic swirl of reality into a single point of perfection. From the archer’s field to the philosopher’s treatise, it commands the imagination, offering the illusion of mastery over a world resistant to containment. As Basis students, the cities we live in are built on the bull’s eye: glittering skyscrapers overshadowing urban villages, economic ambition muffling erasure. The glowing narratives of China’s “economic miracle” – gleaming office towers and sprawling highways – surround our life. Yet what was being paved over – forests cut down, villages displaced, multiplicity denied, fluidity erased, and the imposition of a scarcity not only of material goods but of experiences, identities, and truths – also silently shapes who we are.
The fixed bull’s eye is a creature of modernity. Its singularity demands the precision of the industrial machine, the certainty of colonial maps, and the metrics of neoliberal efficiency. It thrives under state capitalism, a system that turns the pursuit of the bull’s-eye into an ideology. In this framework, the world is not a field of infinite possibilities but a finite set of targets to be hit, conquered, and commodified. The bull’s-eye is no longer merely a mark of skill; it becomes a constraint on the human spirit. The Manhattan Project unerringly at its robotic bull’s eye, grazing the science of destruction into an art of annihilation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki bear the radioactive testament to the power of precision uncoupled from humanity. The bull’s eye becomes a moral abyss: the perfect strike leaves an indelible wound.
To fix a bull’s-eye is to freeze all that is fluid. The hunter’s arrow transforms the restless motion of bulls into a lifeless trophy, just as the cartographer’s pen crosses out shifting landscapes and mother nature with rigid borders and Trump’s wall. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the bridge he walked on was not merely defiance but a declaration that the bull’s eye had been fixed: Rome was no longer a republic, and the locus of power would emerge from a vacuum and coalesce around authority’s singularity. The river’s fluidity became a threshold of unidirectional ambition.
The Renaissance, with its vanishing points and golden ratios, perfected this fixation. The bull’s-eye appeared in Brunelleschi’s domes and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a reflection of humanity’s newfound confidence in its ability to measure and master the universe. Yet, this fixation by geometric perspective extending into and converging at the background of drawings overshadowed the multiplicity of perspectives that lay beyond the frame. The indigenous cosmologies of the Americas held no place for a single, all-encompassing point of reference like Renaissance artists or Newtonian physics. Their fluid relationships to land and identity were crossed out by static lines and grids on the colonizers’ maps.
In the age of modernism, this fixation reached its apotheosis. The rationalization of society under industrial capitalism demanded that every effort be aimed at the bull’s-eye of efficiency. Frederick Taylor’s stopwatch replaced the artisan’s intuition; the factory line supplanted the workshop. Human lives became units of productivity, their worth measured not by their multiplicity but by their proximity to the target. The bull’s-eye had been fixed, and it brooked no dissent.
To rationalize the bull’s-eye is to justify its existence as the only legitimate target. This rationalization takes many forms: the divine right of kings, the manifest destiny of empires, the meritocratic ideals of neoliberalism. Each asserts that the bull’s-eye is not merely desirable but inevitable, the natural culmination of human striving.
Consider the Enlightenment, that great age of reason. It elevated the bull’s-eye of truth to a near-religious status, insisting that the complexities of the natural world could be distilled into universal laws. Newton’s apple fell toward a fixed point, its trajectory calculable and certain. But this certainty masked the violence of its imposition. The Enlightenment’s rationalizations underpinned the transatlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa, justifying the subjugation of entire peoples in the name of progress. The bull’s eye, once fixed, becomes a tool of domination.
In the neoliberal era, the rationalization of the bull’s-eye takes the form of scarcity. State capitalism enforces a worldview in which resources are finite and competition is inevitable. This scarcity is not only material but existential. Identities are reduced to market segments, experiences to monetizable data points. The gig economy exemplifies this logic, transforming the multiplicity of human labor into a series of bull’s-eyes: a ride completed, a delivery made, a task checked off. The richness of work as a source of identity and community is sacrificed at the altar of efficiency.
Yet, the rationalization of the bull’s-eye is inherently unstable. The very metrics that justify it reveal its contradictions. GDP growth, that ultimate bull’s-eye of economic policy, fails to account for environmental degradation, social inequality, and mental health. The bull’s-eye, in its singular focus, blinds us to the broader context.
The bull, unlike its symbolic eye, is not singular. It is a creature of flesh and blood, of motion and multiplicity. To fixate on its eye is to ignore the rest of its being, its duality, and its place in the ecosystem. The same is true of our world. It contains multitudes: diverse cultures, conflicting truths, and fluid identities. The bull’s-eye, in its fixed precision, cannot capture this richness.
The indigenous peoples of the Americas understood this multiplicity. Their oral histories and relational cosmologies embraced uncertainty and change, seeing the land not as a resource to be exploited but as a partner in a reciprocal relationship. The colonial project, with its maps and treaties, sought to impose a fixed bull’s-eye upon this fluid world, reducing it to property and profit. This process continues today in the form of neocolonialism, as multinational corporations extract resources and labor from the Global South under the guise of development. The bull’s-eye has become a weapon of global inequality.
Even within the capitalist core, the multiplicity of lived experience resists the rationalization of the bull’s-eye. The gig worker juggles multiple jobs, the refugee navigates overlapping identities, and the artist defies commodification. These lived truths challenge the scarcity mindset, asserting that life is not a zero-sum game but a field of infinite possibilities.
To move beyond the bull’s-eye is not to abandon precision but to embrace fluidity. It is to recognize that the world’s complexity cannot be reduced to a single point of focus. This requires a fundamental shift in perspective, away from the scarcity imposed by state capitalism and toward a mindset of abundance and possibility.
In “Zen in the Art of Archery,” Eugen Herrigel recounts how his teacher insisted that true mastery lay in forgetting the target entirely. To hit the bull’s-eye was to transcend it, to dissolve the ego and align with the arrow’s natural flight across the fluid sky. Mastery is less about striking the target than about dissolving the need for one.
Such a shift is already underway. Movements for climate justice, indigenous sovereignty, intersectional feminism, and universal basic income reject the fixed bull’s-eye of growth and competition. “The personal is political” reinvests the enterprise of gender equality away from tax money that concentrates at capitol hill to the lived experience in each household. Pioneering studies in Anthropology of Technology (STS) have exposed the social construction of scientific truth that rationalizes inequality and discrimination, showing how the default separation of human population research with sexual categories creates gendered bodies. Philosophers like Bruno Latour advocated pluralistic approaches that prioritized human wellbeing and ecological balance. These movements remind us that the bull’s-eye, far from being a universal truth, is a human construct. It can be reimagined – or abandoned altogether.
The poet John Keats, in his “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” writes of “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss.” This unattainable embrace – the arrow of Cupid forever shy of its mark – embodies the bittersweet beauty of striving. To miss, Keats suggests, is not necessarily to fail; it is to remain in an eternity of praxis, a state of perpetual becoming, where the pursuit itself is the point.
The bull’s eye offers the comfort of certainty, a shelter against the “immense heart of darkness.” But it comes at the cost of erasing the richness of life. To hit the mark is not always to succeed; to miss it is not always to fail. The multiplicity of the world defies this rationalized binary. From climate change to inequality, we must learn to see the bull not as a target but as a partner, a living organism that holds the potential of growth and mobility beyond what each of its biological macromolecules scientifically represents. The bull’s dual eyes reflect the infinite possibilities of coexistence.
The spring issue of The Mortals invites readers to explore this multiplicity. To question the fixing of and the fixation on the bull’s-eye. To embrace uncertainty, fluidity, and abundance of lived experience and identities. For in the end, the world does not revolve around a single target. It contains multitudes, and so must we.
Nonfiction: Current Events and Controversies
Social and Environmental Activism
Explore critical works on activism, history, and environmental justice:
- "The Feminine Mystique" - Betty Friedan
- "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" - Paulo Freire
- "Silent Spring" - Rachel Carson
- "The New Jim Crow" - Michelle Alexander
- "Braiding Sweetgrass" - Robin Wall Kimmerer
- "Freedom is a Constant Struggle" - Angela Davis
Stories and Memoirs
Powerful narratives of human experience:
- "Go Tell It on the Mountain" - James Baldwin
- "The Bluest Eye" - Toni Morrison
- "Invisible Man" - Ralph Ellison
- "The Color Purple" - Alice Walker
- "The Woman Warrior" - Maxine Hong Kingston