6512 by Per Højholt (1969) is a hilarious book. It pokes fun at the diary genre, rides the divided personality and zeroes in on the ordinary, unsophisticated persona we all of us have in common if only we cared to admit it: our comical generic stupidity.

The book hails from a time when so-called “systemic” poetry was all the rage in Denmark and momentous contemplative works such as Inger Christensen’s It, Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s essay collection Nielsen and the White World, and not least Højholt’s own masterpiece Turbo
were published. But in the midst of such seriously theoretical ruminations on matters linguistic came this ludicrous instance of practice couched in the vernacular of the everyman.

It presents to us a young man, presumably in his mid-twenties, living in the home of a family whose every movement (in the evacuative sense) can be heard from the small room in which he lodges. He has his own parents, who he visits on occasion, and a group of friends he hangs about with in a back yard on breaks between time spent reading at the local library, friends who moreover take it in turns to commune with a seemingly more than willing female shop assistant of their common acquaintance. Yet these are essentially peripheral circumstances, the most important thing being the young man’s writing in what purports to be a diary. And the most important thing about his writing is that he can write whatever he wants, nothing’s there to stop him, and no one to check whether what he writes is true or not: he’s the only one who knows. The pages of this diary have come apart and he writes under dates no longer corresponding with reality, arranging the pages in alphabetical order and keeping them together by means of a pair of rubber bands. For further systematisation he computes in a table of contents the sum of the numbers given to each entry, 6105, to which is added the unexplained figure of 407 – whence we arrive at Højholt’s emblematically random 6512.

For the comedy belies a more serious philosophy of Nothing, the force that makes itself known to us in randomness and chance, ungoverned by any norm of society or any regularity of the world. And in all the silliness and antics, it is this force Højholt compels us to see: “Time’s just a lot of nows, I reckon, but I still can’t see it anywhere but in my bloody hair and nails, christ on a bike surely it makes
no odds what day or year it is, but still it’s important. None of us can carry on, there’s nothing you want carried on, and nothing that can carry on from anything else. If I was to think about it, I’d say it’s a right load of bollocks, but when I don’t think about it the thought never occurs to me.”

6512 can thus be read in terms of weighty languagephilosophical themes transposed into a life practice gradually invaded by Nothing, or as a pointing out of the way our civilised lives come apart in the face of a primitive lack of comprehension, as Højholt himself seemingly recognised in his own life.

Bo Hakon Jørgensen