Note: at the time in 2006 it was claimed that this rare species of monkey, no larger than the size of your thumb, was recently rediscovered in China. I have never seen a photograph of this rare species of monkey, but I like to believe it is true.
Sarah Rose Giragosian May 2006
Submitted to the Department of English of Mount Holyoke College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts with Honors
The Ink Monkey
The animals are known as "ink" or "ink pen" monkeys, because they were kept to prepare ink, known in China since at least 2,000 BC, and trained to pass brushes and turn pages. ..To add a tiny and rare monkey to the business of writing would increase a scholar's pleasure and his reputation for eccentricity.
—Len Provisor
This animal is common in the northern regions and is about four or five inches long; it is endowed with an unusual instinct; its eyes are like carnelian stones, and its hair is jet black, sleek and flexible, as soft as a pillow. It is very fond of eating thick China ink, and whenever people write, it sits with folded hands and crossed legs, waiting till the writing is finished, when it drinks up the remainder of the ink; which done, it squats down as before; and does not frisk about unnecessarily.
— Wang Tai-hai (1791)
Among the chaos of curios—
hunks of jade and bone,
oblong tubers and rice papers—
the sleek-bodied apprentice
preens itself with the same pure water used to concoct inks. Runty,
no bigger than the biggest butterfly, the ink monkey loops
around its master’s arm, alighting long enough to be baited with a fish-shaped stick of ink scaled with gold and musk.
Shen flops down his brush
to watch his monkey at its task,
its luxuriant fur bristling
like the cloaked back
of an antagonized clerk
as it grinds the stick into concaved stone and sparks of gold dust fly,
mix with water, and liquefy.
At the ash-edge of print,
monkey and master set down
the wordless axioms, the axed looks,
of primacy and primate; they guard and thumb the tools of their trade.
Come, the scholar signals
to his simian assistant, gesturing.
He snaps a couple of soybeans
into the animal’s hand, but no—
it smells the ink, which entices
like the slick sludge on pond flowers.
A scrapped page is handed over,
and the monkey, ink-intoxicated,
lunches on the blotted leaf,
consuming the insect characters
of Confucius.
At the unwatchable stage of dawn, as the sun’s rude light punches in
Shen’s window, the leaf detaches from its hold, and a tail, prehensile,
flicks.
Notes:
The Ink Monkey
At the ash-edge of print. East Asian inks often are made of charcoal ash culled from pine or bamboo. They have also been fashioned of gold and musk, as is mentioned in the poem. This poem was derived from Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings and Provisor’s article about the ink monkey.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Beings (trans.). Andrew Hurley. NY: Viking, The Penguin Group, 2005.
Provisor, Len. “Even a Monkey can Mix Ink,” Pentrace Articles of Merit,
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collection Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). The craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which is co-edited by Sarah and Virginia Konchan, is forthcoming from The University of Akron Press. Sarah's writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
You can Google Sarah Rose Giragosian for more information on her poetry and writings.
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