On Mourning Our Built-Up World : Quake, fire and flood expose the limits of human existence. But our ‘things’ are not just the detritus of futile attempts to dominate nature. They are our part in creation.

When it comes to discussing the post-fire and -earthquake period in Los Angeles, I tell my mother: Everything is fine; we’re back to normal now. But it’s not true. Since Jan. 17, a sense of the weird has taken over. Last week, two friends were burned out of their home, which spontaneously burst into flames. A pipe bomb was found on the San Diego freeway. Cracks appear in exterior walls and plaster comes off ceilings as the earth continues to settle. And this week, floods.

And so Southern California life continues, swinging between two planes. Jews call this period shiva, mourning for the old in the midst of the new. In this period, we ponder how much we can control, how much we even matter. There’s plenty of time now, on endless rides avoiding cracked freeways, to ponder eternity.

For me, a basic premise about the way things work is up for grabs. Once I craved to live “in nature,” amid the primeval bounties of hill and sea; but now it’s mankind’s works that I monitor and miss. The great eucalyptus grove by the roadside was planted; it did not just sprout. And the homes over there that are now rubble or cracked or otherwise red-tagged--these are personal visions, testimony to what human creativity can bring. What I once thought of as “natural” needed human participation to come to life.

Such appreciation is new to me. I was raised to judge harshly the human role on earth. My bias, received from elders like John Muir, grandfather of the ecology movement, is to leave alone as much of my habitat as possible. Nature creates. I can only mess up.

But now that’s obviously reversed. Nature has messed up. And to restore order, we must begin to create. And so we come to our unfinished business. In the days since the fire and earthquake, acknowledging loss remains our community’s unfinished business. But on both the personal and the civic level, it is not acceptable to grieve. True, fire and earthquake show us how negligible our lives are in the scheme of things, but we’re doing our best to make them more negligible still.

So it is that we tell each other that the family heirlooms now reduced to glass splinters are “just things.” That our condos and apartments were unsafe anyway and therefore unworthy. And that our freeways and shopping malls were unsightly examples of urban sprawl. An aura of embarrassment overtakes those who dare to assert that life was good, that for example, a day in the library or spent walking down Montana Avenue in Santa Monica represented if not true art, then at least a bit of harmony. Instead, the major message is that the works of our hands, that which we have added to the landscape, somehow violate the natural order.

As it turns out, this question of where harmony lies and who and what shall rule reflects an American ambivalence about progress grounded in the late 19th Century. Our economic expansion has typically been justified by a literal interpretation of the Bible: Hasn’t God given the Earth to men like Andrew Carnegie to rule over it? But in the same breath, with help from transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, Genesis is reinterpreted as an ecological tract. By this theory, humans are intended to be low-impact gardeners, placed on Earth merely to “dress” and “keep it.” That’s why Muir, the gardener par excellence and friend of Emerson, fought so hard to keep Yosemite Valley and the national park system as pristine enclaves. And that’s why we give ourselves so little comfort when our urban life is destroyed.

But there is a third interpretation of Genesis, kinder and more comforting, which can help us understand sadness with the loss of our “things.” By this version, mankind is “co-creator”--here to work the land and improve it, to complete what God purposely had left unfinished. It is this third definition that I think about today, in a world of broken glass. Most of us seek neither to dominate the world nor to leave it completely alone. And by now, we understand that whatever we build can be gone in a flash. But between these two poles--between chaos and order--there is creativity and even a stab at beauty. And the knowledge that living in nature is both work and art.