{"id":173172,"date":"2026-03-23T10:00:25","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T14:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=173172"},"modified":"2026-03-20T17:29:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T21:29:17","slug":"the-one-thousand-blobcows-born-each-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/03\/23\/the-one-thousand-blobcows-born-each-year\/","title":{"rendered":"The One Thousand Blobcows Born Each Year"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Hans5400, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under\u00a0CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

A spotted creature is rolled across gravel. Another is placed on a dinner plate, then cradled in two palms. These were meant to be cows but emerged instead as balls of tissue and organs enclosed in hair coats. Their name, <\/span>amorphous globosus<\/span><\/i>, derives from the Greek and Latin for \u201cformless sphere.\u201d I watch videos of formless spheres for the same reason that I watch videos of miniature horses: I am in search of purity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amorphous globosus<\/span><\/i> is a nonviable creature, incapable of development or growth. It\u2019s more easily understood by its missing parts: a head and limbs, a mouth and genitals. Occasionally, it\u2019s given a useless heart. It\u2019s continuous; a sphere at infinity with the weight of a water bottle. Within it are more ineffectual formless spheres, fluid-filled cysts in lieu of functioning organs. At a threshold of never having lived yet never having not, <\/span>amorphous globosus<\/span><\/i> is hard to categorize. Neither a tumor nor fetus, it\u2019s relegated to an anomaly: a <\/span>fetal monster<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>Amorphous globosus<\/span><\/i> is often buried in the dirt like a dead animal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Driving by a cattle ranch, I envision a herd of formless spheres. Low in pasture grass, their short hair ruffles in the wind. One hundred thousand calves are born every day. One in thirty-five thousand are born as formless spheres, about three per day, over one thousand per year. At this moment, last year\u2019s one thousand formless spheres are decomposing. They are contributing to new grass, soon to be eaten by cows, bringing about new formless spheres.<\/span><\/p>\n

Georges Bataille wrote that we call a thing <\/span>formless<\/span><\/i> in order to undermine it. Those given the designation, he claims, will get squashed, \u201clike a spider or an earthworm.\u201d But <\/span>formless<\/span><\/i> is a misnomer on arrival, and a <\/span>formless sphere<\/span><\/i> is an oxymoron. I think <\/span>amorphous globosus<\/span><\/i> is an ideal form: animate yet inanimate, parasitic yet harmless, geological yet doughy, static yet reactive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even when all its qualities have been listed, the formless sphere stokes confusion in people. They reach for comparisons: a meatball, an egg, lab-harvested meat, a very large cow nugget. Like me, they prefer looking at images online of the creature as hairy and whole, without the attached umbilicus, without the remnants of the cow. They give it a better name: <\/span>blobcow<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Can it feel pain? they ask. Can we put it on life support? If we kick it, how far will it roll? And if we squish it, will it squeak? <\/span>Blobcow<\/span><\/i> retains all the presence of a being with all the use and uselessness of an aesthetic object. At times, <\/span>blobcow<\/span><\/i> exudes the joy of these objects. Carried through tall grass, it jiggles.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Samuel Beckett\u2019s Murphy (<\/span>Murphy<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>1938)<\/span> straps himself naked to a rocking chair and stares at an iridescent beam of light. Murphy\u2019s mind is a hollow sphere, \u201chermetically closed to the universe without.\u201d Murphy is clairaudient. For him, thought forms are as dominant as physical forms. Like a dog, he endures sensory experiences beyond human perception.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As a remedy, Murphy lies supine in a park. He claims to pause his heart. Fed up with breathing, he seeks a respiratory machine. In his rocking chair, Murphy rocks himself into a stupor. His pineal gland shrinks to nothing as he seesaws the chair to its limit. His body quiets; he frees his mind. This <\/span>blobcow<\/span><\/i> state is a needed break from the experience of his anatomy, a soft round escape. Not death but not life, an in-between. The cause of his pain\u2014his keen awareness of the world\u2014becomes the origin point for his ascension.<\/span><\/p>\n

Repetitive actions multiply across Beckett\u2019s novels. A man alternates sitting on every stool at a bar. Another carries a handful of stones that he takes turns sucking on. Murphy walks \u201cround and round\u201d the prison, the cathedral, the cross, the wreck. Loops help to cope with the cycle of humanity: \u201ca well with two buckets \u2026 one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Following a tiff with his lover Celia, Murphy heads for the front door. She asks if he is leaving for good. If he <\/span>were<\/span><\/i> leaving for good, Murphy explains, he would take to his chair and not the door. After he leaves, Celia undresses and rocks in the chair. She is in her mind with Murphy, her parents, herself as a girl, as an infant, until \u201cit was finished, the days and places and things and people \u2026 she was lying down, she had no history.\u201d Celia, too, accesses the fundamental and original<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>rocking at the center of an infinite formless sphere.<\/span><\/p>\n

Murphy<\/span><\/i> asks, \u201cWhat was the etymology of gas?\u201d and gives no answer. Historically, the etymology of gas dates back to the seventeenth-century belief that an occult principle exists in all matter. Within Murphy\u2019s rocking chair lives a spirit. It is characterized by \u201csuperfine chaos,\u201d secret knowledge, a void.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

In Ambera Wellmann\u2019s painting <\/span>UnGodly<\/span><\/i> (2021), an indefinable creature births a trinity of humanlike figures from its mouth. Or maybe it\u2019s consuming them. There are few beginnings and no endings, or many beginnings mistaken for many endings, taking place in the erotic rupture in its face. Gazing nowhere yet everywhere, the seeming mammal, with an invertebrate tail, advances and recedes on a black (fore)(back)ground.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ungodly means<\/span> “irreligious”<\/span> or<\/span> “immoral<\/span>.” Also, “<\/span>inconvenient<\/span>.” I think it\u2019s the <\/span>almost <\/span><\/i>quality of the painting that\u2019s inconvenient. Almost: abstract or realistic, born or dying, a creature, a person, sex, a story. <\/span>Almost<\/span><\/i> is uncomfortable, like<\/span> this AI-generated image<\/span><\/a> that mimics the visual experience of having a stroke. Its challenge to the spectator went viral: “<\/span>Name One Thing<\/span>.” Looking at it is nauseating.<\/span> Everything in the image looks like something\u2014cellophane, a fur scarf, a cow or pig head, a steel kitchen appliance, an earring organizer, a glass cake stand\u2014until closely observed. Then, the only thing we see is: <\/span>wall, wall, wall, wall<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like the smudges of color in the <\/span>Name One Thing <\/span>meme, the uncertainty of what we see in <\/span>UnGodly<\/span><\/i> stokes unease. I tend to fixate on the third humanlike figure, levitating on the fingertips of the other two. One end of this unfinished figure fuses to the creature\u2019s nose. It\u2019s nearly shapeless, an ovoid with limbs, but recognizable, as though caught in the process of becoming. All subjects are loosely positioned on a platform suspended in a void. They are all \u201ccoming to life through undoing,\u201d as Wellmann <\/span>has said<\/span><\/a> of another of her paintings.<\/span> Each painting is a \u201cliving thing\u201d in a space that reflects \u201cnavigation\u201d and not \u201cresolution.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAffirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only <\/span>formless<\/span><\/i> amounts to saying the universe is something like a spider or spit,\u201d Bataille writes in \u201cL\u2019informe.\u201d If form doesn\u2019t assign meaning to the universe, then what does? Its defining quality might be akin to what one interviewer calls the \u201cphantasmagorical plain\u201d in which Wellmann\u2019s work resides, one populated by bodies that are \u201cfull of potential.\u201d A space that is constantly shifting and chimerical, hallucinatory, like a fever dream: a resemblance of all that is <\/span>here <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>not here<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

Ambera Wellmann, Ungodly<\/em>, 2021. \u00a9 Ambera Wellmann, courtesy the artist, Company Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Morgan Day\u00a0is a fiction and architecture writer. Her short fiction has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>Ecotone,\u00a0<\/em>Gulf Coast,\u00a0The Southampton Review,\u00a0Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first novel, <\/em>The Oldest Bitch Alive, is out this month from Astra House.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI think amorphous globosus is an ideal form: animate yet inanimate, parasitic yet harmless, geological yet doughy, static yet reactive.\u201d On formlessness, Beckett, and Ambera Wellman. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68827],"tags":[67827,68720,4429],"class_list":["post-173172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-triptych","tag-featured","tag-on-painting","tag-samuel-beckett"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe One Thousand Blobcows Born Each Year by Morgan Day<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 23, 2026 \u2013 \u201cI think amorphous globosus is an ideal form: animate yet inanimate, parasitic yet harmless, geological yet doughy, static yet reactive.\u201d On formlessness, Beckett, and Ambera Wellman.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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