The Carnivorous Center of All Things
Fangs and Gore
Deep in the heart of the Serengeti, where the sun mercilessly beats down on the savannah, a cheetah mother and her young cub pad towards a waterhole. The dry brush crunches beneath their paws as they near the waters.
But lurking unseen beneath the muddy bank, a crocodile lies in wait. Its mossy green scales blended seamlessly with the muddy banks. Its senses are tuned razor sharp, ready to pounce on the slightest ripple, the tiniest vibration.
As the cheetahs lower their heads to drink, the crocodile explodes from the shallows in a flurry of powerful tail-thrashes. Its massive jaws clamp down with bone-crushing force on the unsuspecting cub. The mother looks on as her cub vanished, claimed by the inexorable cycle of the wild. Maybe it cried. I can’t tell. It….just….looked on. Maybe it is the cheetah’s version of a shock. I can’t tell. It….just…looked on. She bent her head to lap up the rest of the water that will quench her thirst and walked away. She isn’t angry. She isn’t surprised. The immutable reality of the kingdom is that one is either the hunter or the hunted. Better the child than her.
I used to consistently critique the ‘speak it to the universe’ geng and now I think it’s unfair. Human beings think they need to believe in a higher power or something bigger than themselves. I get it. I have been in the presence of some pretty big breasts and instantly felt the need to worship. Yes. Boob Worship should be a thing though. I digress.
Our species is consumed with worship. It’s understandable. Have you seen the sun? That red headed sphere can sometimes be domineering. Have you ever been under Lagos Sun? Sometimes I feel that red ball is angry that we didn’t come through on some sacrifices. So as it is not farfetched that we have/had sun worshipers, it is reasonable that we will have people who think the Universe is the Shit. I’m talking about people who actually believe that the Universe contain prayer-answering and wish-granting powers and not those low-key beggars who inundate our virtual throats with their Birthday Wishlist directed to no particular person but the Universe.
When you call on the Universe, I assume you believe it is the totality of our existence. Right? Like the hub? The center from which the spokes of our realities emanate? That Universe. Right? The same universe that created a category of animals called Carnivores who eat nothing but flesh, and then create another category of animals to be food for them? That Universe? Hey. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pray to it but ya know the Universe is a fucking psychopath. Right?
When you call on the Universe, I assume you think it is governed by a natural order. But does it look that that to you? Take your eyes away from the vestiges of artificial order than your fellow human beings create and what else is there? An orderless relentless dance of consumption. From the blackhole devouring a star, to the lion stalking its prey, the cosmic script is certainty written in the language of hunger.
Look at us! Don’t look away. Look at it I command you! See the indelible mark of this ancient program stamped on our very being. Our bodies are honed for hunting and gathering, echoing the predatory needs of our ancestors. Our brains rewired for competition and resource acquisition, reflecting the constant struggle for survival in a world of scarcity. Even our societies, despite the thin veneer of civilization, are built on the fundamental principle of taking from one to benefit another.
Think about this! The roots of our fundamental human nature trace back to the earliest forms of life on this planet — microbes, primordial ooze, the first multi-cellular organisms that would evolve into complex animals driven by primal needs. The beginning of our story has always been an amoral insatiable hunger for whatever can be killed, stolen, or destroyed.
The truth is that we are hard-wired by hundreds of millions of years of genetic coding for the same ruthless self-preservation that defines the wild kingdom. We are the descendants, the heirs, of an existence defined by the consumption of the weak by the strong. A violent, bloodthirsty cycle powered by innumerable deaths to perpetuate the precious few survivors.
The Cosmic Script is Written in Hunger
If I can reach back in time to witness the prideful beginning of our universe, that moment when the first particles coalesced in the seething crucible of the cosmic womb, I am sure I would be able to feel, touch, and even maybe see the source code of this insatiable hunger that drives all existence. Even now as I type these words, I can feel this primal force that winds the clockwork of creation and propels the cosmos in an eternal cycle of consumption and rebirth.
I am also sure if I can get my hands on Antman’s suit and visit the quantum level, I would be able to see the first inklings of this ravenous appetite in the enduring dance between matter and antimatter. I would be able to witness the lethal vortex in which particles and their oppositely charged twins circled one another in a compulsive yearn of annihilation. It is from the ashes of this violent union that all matter is continually conceived.
As the universe expanded and cooled, gravitation, the great devourer that contorts the very fabric of spacetime itself, went to work. Clouds of gas collapsed inward under their own insuperable mass, until thermonuclear furnaces blazed into existence. These roiling stellar infernos began fusing lighter elements into heavier ones in an unending feast, greedily consuming hydrogen to forge the building blocks of future stars, planets and life itself.
When the first microbes emerged from the oceanic depths, they didn’t have the time to bath in the radiance of our sun. Instead, at the behest of genetic coding billions of years in the making, they embarked on an unremitting quest to survive, multiply and metabolize; devouring nutrients and each other to propagate. This spiraled up through the hierarchy of life and refined nature’s voracity into sharper fangs and keener senses.
The first spark of life was borne of a rapacious urge and everything since has been an incarnation of the same drive. From the galaxies that exhaust their stores of star-stuff and grow dark to predate upon one another — colliding, merging, subsuming matter and energy in an infinite regression of consumption to subatomic whirlpools of matter and energy, to the churning heart of our planet being slowly devoured by its molten core, to the embryonic cloud of the next unborn galaxy, to human beings who are actually driven to hunt and devour other creatures for sustenance— the cosmic script is inescapably penned in one perpetual, primordial need. All is driven by an endless cycle of hunger, an unyielding compulsion to acquire, fuse, digest and devour.
I believe that any attempt to cease this eternal binging, even for an instant, would be to initiate the unraveling of existence itself. Survival demands we participate in this waltz where we consume our fill, before becoming fodder in our turn under Fate’s watchful eye. It’s a solemn pact. And a bloody one.
