I’d never truly heard of the Komodo dragon until one lunged at me through a late-night spiral of YouTube. Now I can’t stop watching. Their jaws clamp down on whole, living creatures with the rhythm of inevitability – hoof, horn, and fur swallowed in movements both savage and choreographed. Their throats balloon, their bodies undulate, and the world disappears inside them like waste vanishing into the rear of a garbage truck. They are music, too, reptilian syncopation. A groove laid down by extinction itself. Every strike a downbeat, every swallow a bassline of survival. The echo of dinosaurs in their faces, yes, but also something closer. The echo of us.
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That inward reflex, the unthinking drive: locate, consume, continue. Even our higher minds hum with that same drone. The thoughts we have about what we lack, what we still must fix in ourselves, they’re not insight, but instinct in disguise. Programs with fancier names. Songs we didn’t write but can’t stop singing. And so we invent ethics, beauty, music, all to shape the hunger into something bearable. We sing not to escape the beast, but keep it in time. Dance with it. Make its footsteps sound like meaning. No abstract compassion separate from appetite. Even art is born from the longing to devour and be devoured. Even love wears teeth.