The One Thousand Blobcows Born Each Year

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, amorphous globosus, derives from the Greek and Latin for “formless sphere.” I watch videos of formless spheres for the same reason that I watch videos of miniature horses: I am in search of purity.

Amorphous globosus is a nonviable creature, incapable of development or growth. It’s more easily understood by its missing parts: a head and limbs, a mouth and genitals. Occasionally, it’s given a useless heart. It’s 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, amorphous globosus is hard to categorize. Neither a tumor nor fetus, it’s relegated to an anomaly: a fetal monster. Amorphous globosus is often buried in the dirt like a dead animal.

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’s one thousand formless spheres are decomposing. They are contributing to new grass, soon to be eaten by cows, bringing about new formless spheres.

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

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: blobcow.

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? Blobcow retains all the presence of a being with all the use and uselessness of an aesthetic object. At times, blobcow exudes the joy of these objects. Carried through tall grass, it jiggles.

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Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (Murphy, 1938) straps himself naked to a rocking chair and stares at an iridescent beam of light. Murphy’s mind is a hollow sphere, “hermetically closed to the universe without.” Murphy is clairaudient. For him, thought forms are as dominant as physical forms. Like a dog, he endures sensory experiences beyond human perception. 

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 blobcow 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—his keen awareness of the world—becomes the origin point for his ascension.

Repetitive actions multiply across Beckett’s 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 “round and round” the prison, the cathedral, the cross, the wreck. Loops help to cope with the cycle of humanity: “a well with two buckets … one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied.”

Following a tiff with his lover Celia, Murphy heads for the front door. She asks if he is leaving for good. If he were 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 “it was finished, the days and places and things and people … she was lying down, she had no history.” Celia, too, accesses the fundamental and original, rocking at the center of an infinite formless sphere.

Murphy asks, “What was the etymology of gas?” 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’s rocking chair lives a spirit. It is characterized by “superfine chaos,” secret knowledge, a void.

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In Ambera Wellmann’s painting UnGodly (2021), an indefinable creature births a trinity of humanlike figures from its mouth. Or maybe it’s 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. 

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

Like the smudges of color in the Name One Thing meme, the uncertainty of what we see in UnGodly 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’s nose. It’s 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 “coming to life through undoing,” as Wellmann has said of another of her paintings. Each painting is a “living thing” in a space that reflects “navigation” and not “resolution.” 

“Affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying the universe is something like a spider or spit,” Bataille writes in “L’informe.” If form doesn’t assign meaning to the universe, then what does? Its defining quality might be akin to what one interviewer calls the “phantasmagorical plain” in which Wellmann’s work resides, one populated by bodies that are “full of potential.” A space that is constantly shifting and chimerical, hallucinatory, like a fever dream: a resemblance of all that is here and not here. 

Morgan Day is a fiction and architecture writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Gulf Coast, The Southampton Review, Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The Oldest Bitch Alive, is out this month from Astra House.