Hermes and the Philatelic Construction of the Multiverse

Text copyright Ian Irvine, 2004-2013, all rights reserved.

All images of stamps are from photographs taken by the author or from public domain sources for the names of stamp designers please consult relevant national philatelic catalogues.

[Mercurius Digital Publishing (Bendigo, Australia), 2013]

Acknowledgements
Desparatis and the Peasant Roo, appeared in Verandah 21 (Australia) 2006. The Paper Icon (and the Genie) appeared in Idiom 23 (Australia), Vol.18 2006. The Refugee Fund appeared in Fire (UK) Special International Edition, March 2008. The Great Mother and The Ten Dollar Utopia appeared in LiNQ (Australia), Vol. 33. By Airmail appeared in Tamba (Australia), No. 38, Autumn Winter, 2006). The Poets Super appeared in Tarralla 4 (Australia) 2005. Proud Tilt of the Masses appeared in Verandah 23 (Australia), August, 2008. Several pieces were also highly placed in literary competitions, including The Guardian of Literar y Culture and The Paper Icon and the Genie in the Summerland Poetry Competition, 2005.

Contents: Hermes and the Philatelic Construction of the Multiverse 1. Mint Unhinged 2. A Miniature Truthiverse 3. The Great Mother: Hermes and Queen Victoria 4. The Five-cent Alfred Deakin 5. Desperatis and the Peasant Roo 6. The One Shilling Black 7. The Poets Super 8. The Guardian of Literary Culture 9. The Refugee Fund 10. The Paper Icon (and the Genie) 11. The $10 Utopia 12. The One Pound Soccer 13. Bureaucrats of the Empire 14. By Airmail 15. Proud Tilt of the Masses

Mint Unhinged Stamps are generally optimistic and celebratory they enter the world full of possibility, in mint condition, immortal, godlike many-coloured and precious to behold striking to the eye, trailing moon-dust and meteor crystals, unshadowed, unsullied, lacking Saturnine indolence. The star sign, surely, is Gemini stamps are mercurial, closely entwined with ideal and archetype Wordsworths daisies but gaudy and loud singing of the best of all possible worlds. The postmark, however, is shadow of Eden, fine, or dark and bludgeoned on the story is the same it blots out vision, obfuscates, pins soul and hope to one destiny, one life, one soiled and limited path. The pristine image is smudged or creased or torn. Likewise, perforations are damaged and face value is made worthless by the journey of life. The once uniformal gum, dissolves into codependency with envelope, and thenceforth, liberation becomes something we struggle to conceptualise. The Postmark = The Fall The devils mark, meaning: sin and limitation, Platos cave. Only the collector can enact a partial resurrection. I prefer used stamps,

narratives of survival, they acknowledge a life lived raucous and suffered, a partial vision retained and long hours spent grieving for youthful ideals. before a brutal and blurry finale submissive to Saturn. Unlike poets philosophers and scientists prefer their stamps mint unhinged, But this is to dissolve narrative and suffering, purpose and joy, into a cumbersome perfection.

A Miniature Truthiverse
It has been a mystery to non-collectors that postage stamps, old or new, weave so binding a spell upon those who collect and study them. ... The mystery is not to be explained in a sentence. [Preface to F.J. Melville, Stamp Collecting]

I saw once again a universe framed, a truthiverse of sorts an elemental stew, of energy, colourful-atoms and broiled down matter, inner lit, and tide-like, with soul stuff shift-shifting this way and that, like beans in a shamans rattle. And so I conscripted Stanley Gibbons the Penny Black and the 5/Sydney Harbour Bridge and all those kangaroos! Each album a cathedral each stamp a stained glass gateway to the past. I was hungry once again for thresholds and miniature dreams

The Great Mother (Hermes and Queen Victoria)

When Hermes willed the stamp upon the colonies of an unconceived Australia the convicts and miners, squatters and soldiers in fearing plural selvesChinaman and Hollander, Irishman and Koorithought only of mother, The Great Mother, Queen Victoria. And thus we see Her Majesty in all colours, dyes and shades of dyes, The Ornate Mother, The Side-Reel Mother What need of a world? What need of an Identity? What need of stamps depicting bushland or desert, wombat or kangaroo? Mother England was the World.

The 5 Cent Alfred Deakin (Australia Day Dreaming, January 2011)

The Deakin stamp in the album of Federation shows him no-nonsense Victorian steadfast archetype of the patriarchal leader, nation founder with mandatory beard He probably wrote a dull autobiography I muse. They celebrate his achievement every Australia Day but Id prefer to turn the page, close the cover on White Australia on Aboriginal dispossession. But the pale, green Deakin (small, numerous, boring) slips from the album a sign perhaps? Deakin believed in signs and a transpersonal unconscious. And his stamp begins to animate I pick it up. Occult stamp! it has become the man. Deakin nods and bows. I rub my eyes find myself in the Deakin library. The books are strangely organic they talk, they even sing. And hes there, channeling Mohammed, Wordsworth, Swedenborg, Bunyan We talk on the train to Bendigo its March 1898 hes writing the speech

the one that helped found the nation. Later, hell fight for womens suffrage, arbitration and the old age pension. He asks about the state of the Federation I say: You wouldnt recognise it but then again Politics is like journalism and sport he says (a hint of regret?) each is enslaved to the imperfect present, to realism and compromise, they acknowledge the social as a zone of conflict He pauses as the carriage is invaded (patriots with Aussie flags and loud voices) When he resumes I can barely hear him Trapped in the telescopic hour, we entertain vague notions of the greater good Someone hands him a flag He risesprepares to address the multitude. He does not meet my gaze.

De Speratis and the Peasant Roo

In 1942 Jean De Sperati was charged at Chambery, France with producing counterfeit stamps. The 500-odd different types of rarities he forged have a value of over $4 million on todays market, if genuine. The great problem in detecting Speratis forgeries lay in the fact that many were part genuine. [From The Australasian
Stamp Catalogue, 20th edition, pg. 4.]

In philately the ID is much repressed, all that gloss and striving, progress and achievement, doesnt sit well with the melancholy that fosters self-analysis. The ID is always retrospect, we shiver at the sight of Hitler stamps, or pictures of Chinas red hordesheroic or murderous? invading Tibet. The collectors fascination with shadow is revealed by a love of faults, flaws and forgeriesdeviations by intent or accident, from the official narrative. Jean De Sperati liked stamps, he forged hundreds of them, one was the 2 Kangaroo, black and red first watermark (or soul?)a British crown atop an A for Australia. By techniques alchemical, strangely Medieval, De Sperati faded low value kangaroosonly the postmark remained next he printed the 2 black and red, that aristocrat of Australian stamps, atop his vanquished peasant roo some would say a simple change of clothes. The result a changeling stamp, upwardly mobile and ambitious, but also mischievous neither wholly legal, nor wholly forged. The soul stuffpaper, perforations and watermark legitimate enough, likewise the post-office smudge, only the image is corrupt, the persona, if you like. And thus equipped he presents

as royaltyas Emperor or King a confidence trickster, to those in the know, mocking right breeding and the divine rule of kings. Even the capitalists are duped, how fragile the old-school tut-tut, for with a little theatre we all can move, like Jesus, between the classes. Even currencyGod made manifest in trade proves insubstantial, pliable, a mere scrawl on coloured paper. Today, his status unmatched by even the genuine article, Jeans peasant kangaroo sits all-atop the social heap. More prized than almost every citizen kangaroo, more prized, even, than later 2 black and reds. I think of De Sperati now, and Hermes, God of trickery and thieves and Ned Kelly, immortal despite all protestations, and know that life (ultimately) resists all rigidities of sign and system. My own path soul beneath a mere hap-hazard of garments however finely spun.

The One Shilling Black

After a week the Kulin chose to meet with Batman, who trod their lands with a hungry eye. Batman communicated his desire to purchase land in exchange for blankets, steel blades, mirrors, beads and a tribute, or rent yearly Land purchase had no meaning to the Kulin However, they had a notion of welcome and temporary usage for strangers. Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Richard Broome

The One Shilling Black is seminal, it depicts a tall Koori classic pose, noble, etc. wise and ambivalent, within a dark landscape, (how fitting?) and the Yarra like a blacksnake wriggles between the worlds The (apparent) Symbolism: Progress Made Manifest but also, Guilt Assuaged Look, have we not built a City of God out of the black mans suffering? What was the Koori thinking? The white designer is clearly troubled He shows us Melbourne from the Kooris perspective, from his side of the Yarra, and the city, la ville tentaculaire, is absorbed into black a semiotic intrusion or mere coincidence made euphonic and seedling by history? These days the One Shilling Black is coveted by collectors and historiansto the general public it whispers a nation still mired.

And more besides Civilisation is not intimate Civilisation is a fabulous abstraction a mere conjoining of geometric forms, labyrinthine, a terrifying maze (up close). for black and white alike.

The Poets Super

To progressives, stamps are unambiguous symbols of bourgeois capitalism, but to me, they are beacons of hope gateways to the pleasure principle and on a more practical level, a poets super.

Being a poet I have no super to speak of, there is no later life balance to go up, up, and up on average in sharp simplistic peaks and troughs my retirement is less than guaranteed But poets are inventive

Whenever I have spare cash I buy the Kiwi Queen Victorias imperforate and fragile, full-faced and regal or those stolid kangaroos grazing surreal pastures, red, yellow, green, brown, pink or blue.

Though their popularity waxes and wanes with the price of gold, tax laws and technological change I treasure them like old girlfriends or long banished youthful ideals, Its an impractical addiction! No basis for an investment portfolio! its true All very hit and miss! from an experts point of view, Overly complex, and very old-fashioned! Make your assets productive! and Perhaps youre a little repressed? and Most stamp dealers are sharks. Just like fund managers, I reply, but dont you think theres something romantic about an old poet selling the 5/- Harbour Bridge to pay his electricity bill? or some of the pre-decimal Navigators to pay for a new set of dentures?

When I grow old, Ill sell miniature memories ontologies, ideals, archetypes, alternative pasts half a dozen a week to top up the pension.

The Guardian of Literary Culture

(Civilising the Natives)

All the books in the professors personal library look anemicin need of sunlight and vitamins they remind me of old stamps in musty albums. He stopped collecting decades ago I think, and now he only reads the classics. Occasionally, of course, he dusts off a cover and delivers a lecture in suitably reverential tones. The undergraduates are mostly silent aware of the massive burden of tradition. Stamps, like literary masterpieces, prefer life in the real world when paraded at philatelic gatherings they shun the electronic glare, feeling not unlike battery chooks, and remember better days. The turbulence of coming into being, all those bright colours, and rivers of many-coloured inks. The violence of the minting process, at the mercy of fabulous machines. Then came sheet life among rows of shiny happy clones, all destinations, theirs to imagine. And soon enough the rending, the tearing from sibling and friend before the first stirrings of eros, a brief encounter with tongue and lip and closeness to man or woman, before the inevitable stamping down Ennui begins with a postmark.

Even then, dated and fallen there was still the ecstasy of imagined travelexotic locations and the gaze of appreciative eyes before the inevitable casting out. But for others the chosen fewsamples, survivors there was album life. A superannuated existence far from the worlds temptations, pored over, perhaps, by the aesthete more often, imprisoned by investors. Likewise, the university is an album for dead writers. Observe the wizened academic high on his Theoretic pony a self-proclaimed guardian of literary culture, observe him guillotine a young writer: Yes, all very well to study writing as a craft but can you quote from the classic poets? he said this priest of literature this collector this investor in the soul-stuff of dead writers.

The Refugee Fund

In 1974 Cyprus issued a stamp white-framed with grey background, it foregrounded an ink-drawn child, a little girl a refugee an asylum seeker, perhaps, hunched, homeless and with only a meager bag of possessions. She is slumped among barbed wire swirls circling, scraping, lacerating. The caption is in three languages, in English it reads: Refugee Fund That wise designer who foresaw Woomera Baxter, and the Pacific Solution.

The Paper Icon (and the Genie)

I sit in the cold-steel dawn, all a-skitter, pilgrim in loin-cloth, staring at Jerusalems blue hills, Biblical dust. I say Open sesame! or some such skullduggery, to the tiny paper icon: hoping, believing, faithed up. A tiny genie stumbles into the cool morning air, he yawns, looks dazed probably hung over and campish indifferent. Professional enough though theatrical. A cat howls in reprobate unimpressed by genies. I say, Imagine an orchard in a sun-warm valley, ripe fruit, languid, literatorial afternoons alchemy nights, brilliant child-colours, rainbows and talking parrots on the other side. The genie smells of sex, harem perfumes, and stale hashish, he looks stoned and overworked. And I adjust the magnifying glass to get a closer look at his pagan shoes and sultans pot belly. He responds by dancing a half-hearted tap then shape-shifts into something larger, a man. Whats your problem, Mister? he says. the English is drug-slurred and accented obtuse,

Arabian - but clear enough. I say, Colour the light, and explain the ancient contours of dark. He sighs, Okay Mister, you know the story, thats one wish. And suddenly I am fabric of ink and gum, atomized, part of some popular artists dream-haze but aureole The genie nudges me to one side, leans against a pillared arch, and strokes a wood carving. I laugh at the elephant vistas, remarkable trees, and mythopoetic birds. In the distance mercurial spirits tease the souls of charm-lost mortals, fog-wrapped and blindfold. I say, The ceaseless song returns, providing. The genie flicks an ornate switch, and speakers fire the audio on creation Glorious poet throng! Muse voice! This task complete, he scratches an ass cheek and collapses into a deck-chair, here at the place between worlds, Two wishes kaput, Mister, he says swatting a large desert fly, obsidian-blue, One wish remaining. I think selfish thoughts, Say, Art-fuse, love and poetry for self and kin and species He raises a jaded eyebrow, - have I surprised him? Three wishes done, Mister. A smoke routine follows - impressive enough, to a mortal.

And the genie was true to his word for the paper icon is a cathedral still .

The $10 Utopia

It is said that Ned Kelly dreamed of a republic in the North.

Let us reframe the idea of Utopia. Thomas More in shorts cranking up the barby prodding crocodile steaks his speech staccato studded with quotes from Plato and Homer, Augustine and the Romans, talking ideal futures, to the bored reviewer. His new book, Oztopia: New Pathways for a Rudderless Nation sits beside the chops and sausages, its stained by a single drop of tomato sauce. This is not a media event, this is medicine for the soul of a nation! says Thomas, then Would you like more onion? The reviewerdizzy with wine stares at the books cover The design? A leadlight map, a continent of nations black folk and golden wattles ghosted in the background. In the future theyll commission a stamp, the catalogue listing reads: The $10 Utopia

The One Pound Soccer In 1927 instead of all those royal heads beefy and definitive violet, orange, green, red, blue and lemon all those dreary Your Majesties lined up cheap and boring in the album of God and Country what if theyd printed Johnny Warrens dream the One Pound Soccer and a forked path for Australia.
(In memorium Johnny Warren, d. 2005) Note: The first Australian stamp depicting a popular sporting activity was not issued by the Post Office until 1960, it was the 5d Sepia commemorating the 100th Melbourne Cup. Soccer was finally depicted on an Australian postage stamp in 1976, in the form of the 18c Goalkeeper. It was part of a series commemorating the Montreal Olympic Games.

Bureaucrats of the Empire

Although the Commonwealth came into existence in 1901, and the Post Office was immediately organized on a Federal basis, the first Commonwealth postage stamps were not issued until 1913. The long delay was due partly to political wrangling on the basic design to be adopted. Republicans strenuously opposed the incorporation of the head of the British Sovereign on Australian stamps. This group managed to carry the day with the result that the first postage stamps were of the kangaroo in map design. When, however, the Fisher Government was defeated in 1913, one of the first acts of the Cook Government was to order the issue of a series of stamps bearing the portrait of King George V. [From The Australasian Stamp Catalogue, 20th edition, pg. 4.]

Humane culture begins in the zone between monoliths. It erodes difference (at the risk of vertigo) and is parallels the currencies that move between Empires each soiled by each Twelve years after Australias birth, a paddock of ancestors, wary, exhausted, gapped by extinction gnar-ruck, eastern hare-wallaby, pig-foot bandicootnegotiate a temporary truce with King George V. The thick-necked king, all desperate for allies, agrees to share envelope and postcard with eighteen kangaroos, each caged, like the last thylacine in Beaumaris zoo, inside a map of Australia, and branded of soul, watermarked, by an unseen Crown atop the letter A. Recall from the first stirrings of the heliocentric view of the earth philately and cartography were engaged to marry - future bureaucrats of the empire. The stamp and the map, siblings or cousins, each define geography in terms of a given metaphysic of culturea zone where occupation merges with aesthetic imagining. But, stamps and maps annihilate Australia that original Australia, home to gibber mouse and the paradise parrot. That soulful Australia. Unbounded. Undifferentiated. That singing, ancient Australia.

Maps and stamps colonize soul they modulate and infiltrate the enclaves of being, program vision, to see this and un-see that and always what is unseen, is violated. Cartography inscribes in the wake of conquest philately traces the contours to sanctify the fledgling state both anaesthetize conqueror and conquered alike, send the paperwork to Atlas and Catalogue and thus a history is launched. Nations have personalities stamps = persona (mask) A catalogue of stamps = persona imposed on geography.

By Airmail
Hermes is one of the symbols of the power of the working and creative mind. He embodies the revelation to mankind of wisdom and the way to eternal life. He is the word which, to the degree to which they are open to it, penetrates to the very depths of peoples consciousness. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Pgs 499-501

Hermes is the God of postage and stamp collecting, my world-hop aunts and uncles existed only as memories and occasional scrawls and scribbles on papers and envelopes blessed by the messenger God. Hermes is the God of airlines and rocketry, and every ascent of junk-metal jet high into the atmosphere high above the dwarfed cities, puddle brown lakes and bath-blue oceans is sheer alchemy a gift from Hermes Trismejistus, the cheerful daimon, he who moves between the worlds. Hermes is the God of the written word and the handwriting of distant kin - coded and decoded is product of his magic. In Hermes the writer sees a myth of Creation and whispers, Let these words Soar! Australia acknowledged Hermes in the one shilling and sixpence Airmail stamp of 1929. There he is in the catalogue or album, a slim purple youth with winged sandals, moving between the worlds but not of the world. But Hermes is also a trickster and a guide to the Underworld, to the other Australia of slaughter and convict-oppression,

tiger snake and scorpion, blue-ringed octopus and funnel web spider. Hermes is the God of map-making who else but the messenger God could aid us in visualizing plural worlds - mortal and divine, continents, galaxies, Universes multiple heavens, infinite hells All this to contemplate In stamping an envelope, By Airmail the worlds of the past the realm of the Gods distant nations and peoples, planets, solar systems and galaxies dispersed far and wide across ocean and aether.

Proud Tilt of the Masses

Off the street today a small album of Vietnamese stamps 100,000 dong, or Seven dollars US, sir. It reads like official history but is much more colourful.

For a few years the peasants, trades-people, nurses and conscript soldiers got a good run in Vietnams philatelic record. They appeared in groups, heads tilted proudly, the tallest soldier or bureaucrat or worker at the rear, and always shoulder to shoulder with male and female comrades. And gainfully employed dressed to realize the material dreams of their soviet educated elite. The symbolism? all for an independent Vietnam.

Like the man in overalls on this 1976 stamp a nearby office worker (cadre) seems neither superior nor inferiorthough history announces a future of vast corruption, stifled democracy and greedy elites (kept afloat by foreign investment).

These days the late century switch-over from Communist to Neo-Conservative dictatorship acknowledged by all but the editors of Nhan Dan.

At what cost did the workers tilt their heads in the paper-thin air of so much postage? Always fixated on a map of reunification, an image of Ho Chi Minh or that Yellow Star on a Red background (like the t-shirt I bought) and Lenin (thankfully, rarely Stalin).

In the days before the Chinese invasion the hammer and sickle functioned as a semiotic foundation or should we say watermark? giving legal tender to a regime (intent on invading Cambodia).

The old soldiers who run the government justify much with history. They have known B52s and unimaginable hardship and loss. They are not easy to dismiss as the country lurches toward Adam Smith, tabloid papers, and the internetif only to feed the thirty percent still malnourished after decades of victorious living.

I peruse the semiotic favourites factories and machinery, military hardware, bundles (or full baskets) of freshly harvested fruits and vegetables a philatelic cornucopia for a people wracked by starvation.

And industrious men with hard hats though the ethic of safety absent among the countrys millions of motorbike riders

Go-getter stamps! Hammers poised to bash nails into communal constructions, and women tending noisy machines, as farmers work idyllic rice paddies (though the taxes and kick-backs are harsh and random like colonial oppression). All this industry is tiring! Thankfully the humble water-buffalo features often.

So much for the stamps of the subsidy economy.

By the late eighties native flowers, fish, birds, insects and animals began to reappear, likewiseaway from papertraditional Vietnamese cooking. Soon aftera final irony alongside the flora and fauna, we note resurrected scholars and military leaders (so much history)at least

this new nationalism is mostly indigenous, (though tinged with China).

After contemplation, these paper signifiers accurate enough

a mandarin is a mandarin after all, regardless of the changed dress code.

Author Bio (as at April 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in a number of Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of three journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at Bendigo TAFE (Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.