To mark the publication of Arrows of Desire, the first of three volumes of Peter Wollen’s uncollected writings, Equator reprints his otherworldly short story “Friendship’s Death”.

“Friendship’s Death” was first published in the London literary magazine Bananas in 1976. Edited by the novelist Emma Tennant and designed in tabloid format by Julian Rothenstein, Bananas was an irreverent intervention into London’s literary scene. JG Ballard was a contributing editor, and science fiction writers Thomas M Disch and John Sladek appeared alongside Angela Carter, Beryl Bainbridge and Bruce Chatwin.

Bananas created both a vibrant social scene and a platform for unconventional writing. Peter Wollen contributed a number of experimental fictions. For “Friendship’s Death”, he drew on his brief but intense experiences as a journalist in Amman, Jordan, during Black September 1970 – the twelve-day war between the Jordanian armed forces and the Palestine Liberation Organization that devastated the refugee camps and Palestinian-held areas in large sections of downtown Amman. Wollen’s autobiographical text detoured through science fiction: in the story, Friendship, a robot extraterrestrial from the distant planet Procyon, accidentally lands in Amman. He has malfunctioned in some unknown way and lost contact with his “controllers”; in the aftermath of a firefight Friendship encounters an unnamed British journalist, who seeks to learn more about this “astonishing being”.

The story was made into a 1987 film, also called Friendship’s Death, Wollen’s only solo feature. Tilda Swinton played the titular alien android and Bill Paterson the journalist, Scottish and named Sullivan in the adaptation, as the two holed up in adjacent hotel rooms, sheltering from the gunfire outside.

Arrows of Desire is edited by Kodwo Eshun, Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas. The London ICA will host a discussion among the three editors followed by a rare screening of Friendship’s Death on 21 October 2026.

Although I am not the only person to have met Friendship, I am, as far as I know, the only one who was able to talk to him at any length. The story is a strange one and perhaps many will not believe it. I can only affirm that it did happen. I have one document, produced by Friendship’s hand, the text of which I reproduce here. In itself, it will not convince the sceptical, but for me, at any rate, it is an invaluable aid to memory, the only trace left of an astonishing being.

In the late summer of 1970, I was in the Middle East covering the situation in Jordan for an American radical news monthly. This was the time when the Palestinians controlled a large part of the country, especially the urban areas, including most of the centre of the capital city, Amman. There was constant, but sporadic, fighting going on between the Palestinians and the Jordanian Army. The most publicised engagements were those around the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman, where the great majority of the foreign press corps were based. I, however, because I wanted to understand something of the Palestinian side of things, had chosen to stay in a more humble hotel in downtown Amman, in the Palestinian-controlled area.

The atmosphere was very strange. The Jordanians controlled the tops of the hills, on the sides of which and in the valleys between which Amman is built. They also controlled the outskirts of the city. From time to time, there would be an exchange of fire, Jordanian tanks would press forward, there would be a test of strength around one target or another, but it was not yet all-out war. It was immediately after one of these skirmishes that I first met Friendship. I was in the area near the University campus, which was in Jordanian hands. There had been a lot of gunfire, mainly from Jordanian tanks, and I had heard a rumour that the Jordanian air force had also been involved, which was an unusual event.

I knew one of the Palestinian commanders who had arrived on the scene and presumably this is why Friendship was brought to me. He was presented as a foreigner, English-speaking, who had somehow strayed into the battle area and did not appear to have any papers. The Palestinians who brought him wanted to know who he was. So we went to a nearby building, drew up some chairs and started to talk, over some glasses of tea that appeared from somewhere, and which the stranger refused politely. The information he gave me was not at all what I had anticipated.

He told me that his name was Friendship and that he had come, in his own words, from “visitors from outside”. He was an extraterrestrial and had been sent to Earth as an ambassador. However, during entry into the Earth’s gravity, something had gone wrong, though he himself didn’t understand exactly what it was. As a result, he had lost contact with his base and had landed in the wrong place. Indeed, he was somewhat alarmed by just how wrong the place was. While, of course, he had been warned there might be a hostile reception and the Earth was by no means a non-violent place, he had not expected to come down in the middle of a battle.

The original plan was that he should land in the United States, on the MIT campus. There he was to ask specifically to be taken to Professor Chomsky. The reasoning behind this was that Chomsky was both the most eminent figure in the very relevant field of linguistics and also a man known for his pro-peace, liberal and humanitarian outlook. In fact, the “visitors” seemed remarkably well-informed about what was going on here, especially in the sciences and in politics. Friendship was well-briefed. When I explained to him where he was, he seemed already quite familiar with the main lines of the situation. He also spoke very good English, with a slight American accent.

Friendship said almost straight away that it was probably not a good idea to tell the Palestinians who he really was. He had taken me into his confidence in the hope that I could help him devise some convincing cover story, which would give him time to figure out what to do next. He had, naturally, relied on the possibility of communicating with his base and now, with that possibility cut off, he was rather at a loss as to his best course of action. I was quite willing to go along with him over this, since I could see, as a journalist, that there were obvious advantages to me if the secret could be kept from others for a while, with me as the confidant and intermediary.

I have to admit too that I still was not completely convinced by Friendship’s story. My first reaction was that this was maybe some kind of CIA plot to infiltrate an agent into the Palestinian side. However, it seemed rather unlikely that even the CIA would come up with such an outlandish tale to back up their ruse. Alternatively, it might be some kind of elaborate hoax, the point of which was completely beyond me. Possibly Friendship was demented, a compulsive mythomane and impostor, though he seemed sane and sober enough.

In any case, I thought up a story: that Friendship was a Canadian journalist, sympathetic to the Palestinians, that I had seen him around before, knew him a bit (luckily I had greeted him affably when he was first brought up to me) who had had his papers and money stolen somehow and hadn’t been able to get back to his hotel before the firing began. I would take him back with me. To my relief, they accepted this, probably because they had the aftermath of the fighting to cope with. Six or seven people had been killed and they did not want to have to deal with the problems of foreign journalists when there were other priorities. So I took Friendship back to my hotel with me and booked him a room.

Back at the hotel, I naturally went on talking to Friendship, trying to probe a bit more into his identity. I wanted to know, for instance, why he looked like an American. I had always imagined that extraterrestrials would look very different from us. He explained that he had been specially “designed” for his mission, so that he would appear normal to people on Earth, and not extraordinary or intimidating in any way. The whole of his mission was to extend the hand of friendship (hence, of course, his symbolic name) and not appear as a threat. He was, in fact, what we would think of as a robot, with artificial intelligence and a very sophisticated system of plastic surgery and prosthesis.

Naturally, I took notes during these conversations. These were later destroyed when the hotel was hit by mortar fire when the fighting began to reach its peak. I lost everything I had collected together in relation to Friendship, except for the one document I had in my pocket at the time. I left Amman immediately afterwards, so as not to get caught in the heavy fighting, without seeing Friendship again. But this is a later part of my story. It is, of course, a tragedy that nothing more concrete has remained.

Friendship explained further that not only had he been cut off from his base, but part of his own mechanism had been disturbed during entry. Normally his base could switch on a kind of “overdrive”, through which he acted and spoke directly under their instructions. This was no longer in effect. It was the first time that he had enjoyed full autonomy, and he was very uncertain how to proceed. He was afraid that, if he made his presence known, he would be unable to carry out his mission successfully without the proper instructions and usual control device, and might abort the whole enterprise, which was obviously rather delicate.

On the other hand, he was reluctant to self-destruct, which immediately presented itself to him as a second option and which he imagined is what would have been expected of him and which normally would have been enforced in the event of some fault. Partly, I think, this was because he tentatively welcomed his unanticipated autonomy, even though it posed problems for him that he was not equipped to handle with certainty. I can imagine that it seemed a challenge to him. But it took him some time to learn to adjust to his new privacy.

Mainly, he wanted to talk to me – he was as eager to find out more about my world, as I was about his. Moreover, he either could not or would not give me any solid information about where he came from, who the “visitors” were, the nature of his base, and so on. In his words, all this was “outside the scope of his debility”. His memory had not been constructed that way. Information of that sort would have been cleared from base during discussions and negotiations in the United States. He was simply equipped with enough knowledge about us to function on an acceptable day-to-day basis.

It turned out that the main things that fascinated him were to do with childhood, sex, the unconscious, and the poetic use of language. It is fairly obvious why this should be: these were the cluster of areas where direct experience had been ruled out and where, though he had information about them, he felt most like an “impersonator”, as he put it. He himself had been produced, as far as he was aware, with command over language from the start and with a memory already stocked with data. He found the premature birth and prolonged infancy of humans very puzzling as an idea, their late access to language and selective memories.

I remember once trying, rather haltingly, to explain Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex for him – he was aware of it, but only as a topic that might come up in conversation. Parricidal phantasies he was able to grasp without too much difficulty – after all, his own erstwhile “controllers” could be identified with “father figures” and he could readily see that the “fault” that occurred during entry could be construed as the realisation of his own Oedipal desires. At any rate, his own uncertainty after the control device was inoperative had to be seen in this kind of light. He had experienced “anxiety”.

But incestuous desire for the mother was much more difficult. To begin with, he had no sexual response, in the human sense, though he had been given “appropriacy conditions” which activated two distinct sets of behavioural rules, one for women and one for men. Secondly, his only relation of dependency for energy, the closest equivalent to the human infant’s hunger for food, had been on the same “controllers” who were the “paternal” authority figures. They therefore appeared as a combined parent in his phantasy, although in reality they were not divided into two genders at all. Indeed, there was a sense in which Friendship, by virtue of the part he was designed to play here on Earth, was the first ‘sexed’ extra-terrestrial.

Of course, it may be that they had their own analogous or indeed utterly different system of sexuality. But if so, it had been repressed by Friendship. What the consequences of this might have been, I could not begin to surmise. Friendship offered the opinion he might be a “hysteric”, but I think this related more to his compulsive role-playing as a human, rather than to his own etiology. At times, too, he would experiment with playing at being a child, a situation that, I must confess, I found extremely embarrassing. All the more so, perhaps, because he was in reality dependent on me for money, for conversation, and for protection.

His interest in language was related to his attempts to understand what the unconscious might be. It is this, perhaps, that explains the document published here, which is fairly typical of Friendship’s literary output. According to him, it is a translation of Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune. I happened to have the Penguin edition of Mallarmé with me – as well as Glubb Pasha’s autobiography, Kinglake’s Eothen, T.E. Lawrence, a Patricia Highsmith novel, and a book of crossword puzzles, all of which Friendship eagerly read. It was Mallarmé, however, which interested him most. As far as I can make out, his method of ‘translation’ combined literalness with a set of systematic procedures for deforming ordinary uses of language.

He was puzzled by the way a usage that in one context might be thought incorrect or in error could appear elsewhere as ‘poetic’ and hence, not only admissible, but even laudable. He also had a theory that the only way he could cope with his own “heterogeneity”, as he put it, was by use of language to create a realm in which heterogeneity was dominant, through the invention of a system of interminable verbal transmutations. It seems his Mallarmé translations were envisaged by him as the first experiments in this direction. Bizarre as they may seem, he considered them to be comparatively close to standard English and only giving the barest indication of the possibilities open to him, since, as he put it, he was not constrained by any fixation on a “mother tongue”.

Friendship stayed in the hotel with me for about two weeks. During the second week, he began to venture out into the street, though taking care to avoid direct encounter with other people. It seems he wanted to observe at first hand what life was like in the city and how the war was progressing. At this time, too, he began to talk more about politics and the issues at stake in Jordan – nationalism, Marxism and so on. Usually, he was better informed than me on these subjects. Presumably those who sent him had studied the political ideologies and conflicts of this Earth with great attention.

He also began to show a particular interest in machines, even the simplest such as alarm-clocks and typewriters. His affection for them was perhaps something like that of a human for small birds or animals. He recognised some kind of kinship with these machines, though of course he was himself generically very different and infinitely more sophisticated. He was disappointed with me because I tend to hammer the keys of my typewriter, which, as he quite rightly pointed out, was bad for the machine. He showed an aversion to rust, rather like that of a human being for rashes or sores.

It was becoming increasingly clear that Friendship was beginning to move towards making a decision. Moreover, it looked as though he had lost interest in his original mission. He never, for instance, took the trouble to inquire where the US Embassy was in Amman. Indeed, he seemed more and more to sympathise with the Palestinians, as the war became more intense. It was hard not to. Their desperation cried out. I noted that he had begun to teach himself some Arabic, from an elementary grammar and phrase book I had bought.

Finally, one day, it must have been in the second week of September, Friendship came into my room and began to expound his latest chain of thoughts to me. Human society, as Marxism described, was marked by class divisions and class struggle. The main emphasis was usually placed – and there were good reasons for this – on the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and by extension, imperialist interests and Third World peoples. Human society, however, was marked by other divisions, which were also lines of oppression and exploitation. The most obvious of these was that between men and women. Friendship remarked that it was all too obvious why he had been “scripted” to play the part of a man in his controller’s scenario.

There was, Friendship went on, yet another division, that between human and non-human. In the past this line had often been drawn within humanity itself, to exclude women, subject or barbarian races, or slaves. Today it usually implied the exclusion of animals, although, as Friendship pointed out, humanitarian principles were often extended to cover the animal world, sometimes even fishes, though rarely insects. Machines, however, were always excluded, because they were not considered animate or sentient. Yet clearly there was a sense in which a clock had as much in common with a human being as a snail. Indeed, humans had often been likened to machines by philosophers.

The crucial difference, according to Friendship, is that machines are perceived as the product of history rather than nature. They are man-made and would not be possible without human labour and skill. They were devised from the start as instruments to serve humans, unlike animals which had to be tamed and domesticated. They seemed therefore to have an essential instrumentality. But, Friendship went on – and, of course, it was painfully clear by now which way his argument was tending – he could not possibly look at machines in the same way. He was one himself. Moreover, he had intelligence, privacy and autonomy. He felt, although he was not a human, he was clearly entitled to the same considerations.

Friendship went on to explain how he had come to feel he had a responsibility to future machines on Earth. At present, the artificial intelligence of machines was still very limited, but it would certainly reach much higher levels. He felt he should set an example. He should refuse sub-human or slave status. The best way to do this was to join forces with those humans who were themselves exploited and oppressed. Consequently, he had decided to join the Palestinians in their struggle. He would be a representative, not so much of machines today, as of the potential oppressed class of intelligent machines and servo-mechanisms of tomorrow. It was important, too, he felt, that workers should not see machines as threats to their own jobs and livelihoods, as perpetual scabs and rivals, but as fellow workers, at least at the point when machines began to develop needs and qualities comparable with those of humans.

He asked me to use the contacts and connections I had to get him accepted in the Palestinian militia. The military situation was urgent, he pointed out, because the Jordanian Army attacks were becoming fiercer daily. At first, I tried to dissuade him. Surely, I said, he should leave with me – I was already planning my departure – so that he could finally meet people like Chomsky and other academic experts with whom he could have a really valuable exchange of information and ideas. After all, I was not in a position to give him the kind of theoretical knowledge he wanted, about psychoanalysis or linguistics or anything. My specialisation was politics, where he was already very well-informed. Nor did I know what were the most productive questions to ask him, I simply used hit-and-miss methods, which invariably seemed to miss.

Friendship quickly disabused me of my fond hopes. If he accompanied me, he said, the chances were that he would be detained and dismembered, so that these scientists I was talking about could analyse the way he was put together, his intelligence and linguistic system and so on. His body would be prey to chemists and metallurgists. His brain would be opened up to see whether it worked differently from the current generation of advanced computers, which it obviously did. If he was going to be destroyed, he concluded, it would be better to choose his own method. He would certainly be denied any rights. Consequently, he preferred to face destruction in the interests of those who were themselves denied their rights, rather than those who did the denying.

There was no answer. I had come greatly to like and respect Friendship, I did as he asked and, since the Palestinians needed any help they could get, they accepted him without too many questions asked. He spoke enough Arabic by now to get by and they gave him arms, a Kalashnikov, and considered him a Canadian volunteer. The next couple of days saw an even greater intensification in the level of fighting. As I said above, my hotel was shelled and I decided to get out fast. All I could take to hold on to my experience was the Mallarmé translation he had given me shortly before. I managed to get out across the Syrian frontier. The Palestinians, as we know, were overrun by the Jordanian army. Thousands died. Among them, I am sure, must have been Friendship.

I have been very reluctant to give any account of this extraordinary event. First, I felt sure it would be disbelieved. Second, I was myself deeply traumatised by the defeat of September 1970. I knew many who died, not well, but enough for it to be painful and depressing to me personally. Among them of course, was Friendship himself, now a heap of wreckage somewhere in or near Amman. Third, I found the whole episode so out of the ordinary, so beyond my comprehension, that it was difficult to cope with intellectually and I was afraid, particularly in the absence of notes, of simply trivialising the incident, robbing it of its quite unparalleled and unprecedented significance. I suppose I felt rather like the Evangelists must have felt before starting to write, many years after the death of their protagonist.

However, if only for reasons of piety, I thought I should finally compose the above brief notes, impromptu, without racking my memory to reconstruct events in detail or searching too deeply into the implications of the story. Perhaps some time in the future, now that I have got this far, I will be able to go further. It is important too, I think, that Friendship’s own translation should survive. There will at least be something, a few crabbed and inadequate pages, to commemorate Friendship’s death.

Friendship’s Translation of

L’après-midi d’un faune.

A Forger’s Evening.

I vault to persecute these white water-lilies. So thinly sown their legionary folly winds silk threads in the brass broken by butlers between the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Japan.

Did I make my waking my eyrey? My wood for making staves for casks, small palette knife of androgynous nullity, knocks against many an awl-shaped arbour, made of entwined branches, which, taking away the mitre of the probable woodwork itself, proceeds, alas ! whence I, severe, dazzled myself with the same reed-cane chair for garbage. Let us reflect lights or colours... Or if the thigh-bones that you gabble at spin out a soy-sauce of your full-faced sensations ! Forger, illumination, like a cowardly one who claims to be possessed of means to find out springs of water, clears thistles from the chilly bluish yawl of the most chestnut-haired: but the other, all yielding, do you guide her to countervail, like the inconstant fan-joints of umbrellas easy to put on your roof?

No ! Through the real and lustful pampas, hinting at bedsteads to the staunch mastiff should it luxate, there loiters no wonderment not made verses of by my child’s whistle under the embossment where the ceremony of signing articles of marriage is set forth; and the only felling of timber, commended to be raised up upon the two blast-pipes, before it makes ready the fathom-line with aristocratic plumage, is, on the clock unrewarded by any screen, the visionary, most serene and artful alchymy of instability, enlivening the wax-light.

O Siennese hems of a slanderous shoeing-smith that my system of water-gates anoints a king, longing for solenite, taciturn beneath etiolated streams. DENY ‘that here I was coupling the crying, oozing blood, bestowed in retaliation; when, on the glenoid, lawful rods, like oracles, a blanching that lasts but one year undulates to its lair: and that, with lentiform prematureness, where the catching of birds with bird-calls is given as a pledge, this poultry yard of mangles, no ! of dwarves is botched or pitched...’

Everything that cannot be hoped darkens in the treacherous chock, in which too much the hymn, defiled by one who dearly loves the imperial standard of Byzantium, together unbent the cable of which artery, unspeckled: then shall I deaden myself to the premonitory buttock, laughable and severe, beneath an anti-social fleet of lunary, loose-strife ! and one of you both for meddlingness.

Other than these twelve laughers, crushed by their harrier-bitches, the fall, which vilely vexes perfidies, my fish-net, old and valiant knight, makes lukewarm a mystical death, dubitative of some aulic toothwort; but, let it pass ! a certain black resin averted the configuration of the Jurassic and Vedic plantation of rushes, which we enjoy beneath the unleavened bread: which, slandering the hoop-net’s plaything to itself, reverberates, in a loquacious solstice, that we anagrammatized the snout of bombazine by propitious refutations of itself and our creamy extortion of hush-money; and, as pale as flame is watered, the making of a monstrous, sophistical and vanquished progeny pour out in words the ordinal book of the Muhammadans, whose purgative proportioning and part of cod below the fins is stopped up by my confined regattas.

Speckle then, witness to deed and lightning, O sickly Tacitus, and ebb back from the lacerations where you grow tender to me ! Feverish with rumination, I shall then parody fainting-fits; and with ignorant scurf bond sentimental lovers to their parasols: so, when I have sweetened the order of reason, to banquet on pure metal torn to pieces by my field-marshal, harsh, I cut off the old gleanings of the wax-light and, suffering in lunar place of ill-repute, debased by drunkenness, furnish them again till I am sixty years of age.

O white water-lilies, let us be glutted with various SOVEREIGNTIES once more. ‘My carnation, hastening the strewing of the flowers, dated from afar each unalterable impediment, that tints its haze in the shower with a sifting of solitary wild boars, not quite three years old, under the wax-light of the crime; and the splenetic bayonets of iron bolts are exempted from order and curliness, O swivel-guns ! I dress myself out ridiculously: when, by a small pedestal for a bust or vase, are intertwined (mewed at by an examiner of hog’s tongues ruled by the vitiating appetite to be desolating) plants of leopard’s-bane, severe among their hastated quick clear fires; I alter my mind, without rendering them less ugly, and plunder this massora, shooting wild ducks in the cold shade, where reeds beat down the solenite mock-sun and our pastimes are parenchymatous as contaminated jousts.’ I set my back against you, old man who stretches stuff just dyed, O fascicular thin stroke of the cloudy, sacrificial dray for carrying stones, glorifying itself to thunder at my leafy harrier-bitch which, like weaving celandine ! sips the hundred years old frolic of the bishop’s throne: from the small pedestals for busts or vases of the unimaginable to the coffers of the fearful one, diluted at the same time by a harmlessness, humiliating with withering eye-veins or less triturable tide-sluices. ‘Jovial at fawning on the phaetons which lie beyond the mountains, the abrupt termination of my metallic vein is that which has divorced the greedy, stifling heat of diminutions that the detractors refrained from so mellifluously: for, I scarcely had surveyed a slate-coloured reef, the hexagonal reply to one severe (securing the Siberian squirrel, dwarfish and not rusty, by a fictitious piece of thread shorter than a needleful, so that her plutonic sugar-candy might be telegraphed for a fee from the stretched-out ottoman) when, from my quick clear flame, unfavourable to courageous tremblings, this ever incurable projectile removed itself, not turning on its pivot the blood-sucker for which I was still in abeyance.’

No matter ! Others will call one another to me with good nature, their mountebank’s stage maintained by the horn-stone of my limits: you wash with soap, my passivity, and, rotten and already murmuring, each passion flower eclipses and loiters in aberration; and our province, drained of what shall pay for it, strikes down all the etesian grubbing at relinquishment. At the time when this woodwork is telegraphed by oracles and tomtits, the decision of the mufti on a point of religion is inquired into in an extended folio: Etolia ! it is upon your slopes screwed down by Veronica, who possesses her ingorious declivities by your clysters, that the triturable sleep crazes the purified flake of fire. I tempt the greengage !

O superabundant play of colours...

No, but the improvement of wavering double stakes and this alpine Superior of a Minim’s convent suck in slowly the sweet feverish butterfly of Southern Europe: with no more ado we must endow the corn-chandler’s very thin kind of pastry, enveloped by a serpent in the alternating hour-glass and, as I make my eyrey, oxidating my ring in the efficient astringency of vinegar !

Verse, farewell; I shall transport the black-ochre you rendered dissolute.