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 Poet’s 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 Literary

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 Poet’s 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 -

Wordsworth’s 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 devil’s mark, meaning:

sin and limitation,

Plato’s 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 shaman’s 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 selves—Chinaman and Hollander,

Irishman and Koori—thought 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 I’d 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 he’s there, channeling Mohammed,

Wordsworth, Swedenborg, Bunyan …

We talk on the train to Bendigo

it’s March 1898

he’s writing the speech

the one that helped found the nation.

Later, he’ll fight for women’s suffrage,

arbitration and the old age pension.

He asks about the state of the Federation

I say:

‘You wouldn’t 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 rises—prepares 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 today’s market, if genuine. The great

problem in detecting Sperati’s 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,

doesn’t 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 China’s red hordes—heroic or murderous?—

invading Tibet.

The collector’s fascination with shadow

is revealed by a love of faults, flaws and

forgeries—deviations 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

kangaroos—only 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 stuff—paper, 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 royalty—as 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

currency—God made manifest in trade—

proves insubstantial, pliable,

a mere scrawl on coloured paper.

Today, his status

unmatched by even the genuine article,

Jean’s 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 man’s suffering?’

What was the Koori thinking?

The white designer is clearly troubled—

He shows us Melbourne from the Koori’s 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

historians—to 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 Poet’s 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 poet’s 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,

‘It’s an impractical addiction!’

‘No basis for an investment portfolio!’ it’s true

‘All very hit and miss!’

from an expert’s point of view,

‘Overly complex, and very old-fashioned!’

‘Make your assets productive!’

and ‘Perhaps you’re a little repressed?’

and ‘Most stamp dealers are sharks.’

‘Just like fund managers,’ I reply,

‘but don’t you think there’s 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, I’ll 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 professor’s

personal library

look anemic—in 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 travel—exotic locations—

and the gaze of appreciative eyes

before the inevitable casting out.

But for others

the chosen few—samples, survivors—

there was album life.

A superannuated existence far

from the world’s 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 Jerusalem’s 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 sultan’s pot belly.

He responds by dancing a half-hearted tap

then shape-shifts into something larger,

a man.

‘What’s 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,

that’s one wish.’

And suddenly I am

fabric of ink and gum, atomized,

part of some popular artist’s

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, it’s

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 reviewer—dizzy with wine—

stares

at the book’s cover

The design?

A leadlight map,

a continent of nations—

black folk and golden wattles

ghosted in the background.

In the future they’ll 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 they’d printed Johnny Warren’s 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 Australia’s birth, a paddock of

ancestors, wary, exhausted, gapped by extinction—

gnar-ruck, eastern hare-wallaby, pig-foot

bandicoot—negotiate 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 culture—a 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 people’s 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

Vietnam’s 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 inferior—though 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 internet—if 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 country’s 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,

likewise—away from paper—traditional

Vietnamese cooking.

Soon after—a 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.