Truth Is Not Subjective.  I lettered this in crayoned Arts and Crafts script on a piece of bond paper and it hung on my porch for over a year until it blew away, perhaps to share its message with the world.  At the time I made the sign I was furious.  A grant-winning member of the Maine arts community had extolled on PBS the “subjectiveness” of truth, that we each create our own.  He blathered on.  Your truth.  My truth.  We’re all entitled.  Scampering about in his philosophical quagmire, he fancied himself to be politically-correct for well over an hour.      

     Crap!  Unless we acknowledge there is ultimate truth, we ourselves personally, along with all art and science, become meaningless.  Truth may seem ephemeral, misrepresented, misunderstood, but without a surety of its irrefutable existence, our own is in question as well.  To discount truth is to discount all human accomplishment from cave painting to the mapping of the genome.  It is appalling.  It is frightening.  It is the abyss which laughs at the black hole. 

     In the intricate way of serendipitous metaphor, today I discovered that same hand-lettered sign, more than a bit the worse for wear, lodged in a cranny beneath the porch table.  A decade of Maine weather had not erased the letters.  Faint but legible ---  Truth Is Not Subjective.

     Every work of art worth the name has truth as its focus.  Truth is the basic beatitude.  The DNA of all the others.  Truth.  For that is all we really need.