A Jim Hamby Bird Drawing and Pensée

From Gifts of Oneself: Art and Writings by James H. Hamby

It was a great honor and privilege for me to co-edit, with Roxeann Dunn, the book of bird drawings and philosophical reflections by my good friend and colleague, bird watcher and artist, Jim Hamby. Jim was a center and linebacker at Notre Dame, a military policeman in the US Air Force, a hard-nosed football coach at SEMO for ten years, and a brilliant, immensely popular professor of philosophy from 1968 until his untimely death in 1986 at the age of fifty-five. Here is the transcription of the above pensée.

August 18, 1978 (American Goldfinch; Robert Hamblin)

If you were a Methodist, Bob, [1] I would remind you what a wise old preacher of that persuasion once told me: “Be careful of what you pray for—you might get it.”  I mention this because I suspect you have “lusted in your heart” after one of my pictures.  If you were a Presbyterian (Calvinists all, libera nos, Domine) I would say that there was no way you could avoid getting one of them.  But then (all ifs aside) you are a heretic after my own heart, a Protestant every bit as dear to me as Saint Martin Luther: so, considering what you, Jennie Frye, and Pope John XXIII (have you ever read Jurgen [2] on the problem of numbering popes named “John”?) have taught me on the impossibility of pre-judging or defining “Baptist,” I am almost absolutely sure that I am not giving you this picture for any religious reasons whatsoever.  Instead, I am giving it to you for purely professional reasons.  I admire you as a coach, and I respect you for the deeply-felt profundity of your poem, “On the Death of the Evansville Basketball Team,” which is by far the best thing I have ever read on what being a coach means—in the long run.  The quintessence of coaching is caring.  These birds of mine show it, and it is beautiful, and beyond all other treasures, because it shows itself so rarely in a world where “evolution loves death more than it loves you or me.  This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.  The words are simple, the concept clear—but you don’t believe it, do you?  Nor do I.  How could I, when we’re both so lovable?  Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves?  This is the key point” (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 179).  It does not take our childish consciousness long to realize how unique we are, how worthy of preserving in our rarity we are.  Given loving parents and sympathetic friends, we can easily elevate this belief into a dogma.  Coaches, then, come along with their skepticism, their realism, and their concern, to show us how wrong we were—and yet how right we, each in our uniqueness, were.  Ergo: I say unto you old friend, Deogratias for what you have done as a coach in combating dogmatism, and for that which is dogmatic in you (which, I confess, you have yet to show me) I say unto you: “Benedicte decanus, fratre, et Dominus vobiscum.” [3]  This—lest the reader be unacquainted with me—comes from a hard-core Catholic, pre-Vatican II dogmatist who dearly loves the ritual, the Latin, and the wisdom of a church that held strong against change for twenty centuries.

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[1] Robert Hamblin, professor English at Southeast Missouri State University, poet, and youth basketball coach.

[2] Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, a novel by James Branch Cabell (1870-1958), published in 1919.

[3] “Deacon, brother, and the Lord be with you.”