ANTH 296
Final Research Paper
5.21.21
Close, but Not Quite: Near Death Experiences as Transgressive and Liminal Events
The experience of being near something great but not quite touching it is a universal one. I was a national merit semi-finalist. My dad dated XYZ celebrity in high school. I had the lottery number one digit off from the winning one. These events happen every day, but usually are forgotten, moving into the background of the stories that make up our lives. Some almostexperiences, however, specifically ones that narrowly avoid something decidedly negative, which are better referred to as ‘near-miss events’, are regarded as more remarkable. Again, these experiences can be broadly defined, and therefor commonly felt—I stepped out into the street this morning and was nearly struck by a car; I am so glad that I checked my calendar, or I would have missed my job interview; I accidentally cut myself cooking, but if I had cut even a centimeter to the left, I would have nicked an artery. Near misses are often ignored, but as Garry Gray says in The Sociology of Near Misses, “by studying events that almost happened, social scientists have the potential to gain a fuller understanding of any given phenomenon”. 1
In September of 2017, I was in a serious bus crash. I was lucky, regarding my injuries— two cracked ribs, a concussion, a persisting fear of busses—but was all of a sudden a young person immersed in a conversation of and perpetual game regarding death and the question of “what if”. What if the bus had crashed just 100 feet ahead of where it did, where we would have
Gray, Garry. “The Sociology of Near Misses: A Methodological Framework For Studying Events That 1 ‘Almost Happened.’” The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie, vol. 43, no. 2, 2018, p. 172
been next to a cliff? What if the bus had rolled 2, maybe 3 more times and crashed into the souvenir sword shop that, almost comically, was right next to where we landed? What if your injuries had been worse? Some asked. Finally: what if you had died?
What if I had died? I think about it often, but not always in the wholly fear-based, negative way that one might suppose. I am grateful to be alive, but the very moment when my life was at risk did not seem extremely terrifying. This is a phenomenon that can be well explored through some of Georges Bataille’s writing. Bataille discusses, in the section entitled “Animality” in his piece Theory of Religion, the concept of immanence. Immanence is the state of living like “water in water”—animals have immanence, and an animal is not conscious of any distinction between itself and it’s environment. Bataille, through his text, explains that humans have lost 2 immanence, but oh, do we desire it. We are fascinated by the immanence we have given up, but are entirely unable to grasp it, as living like “water in water” would require us to die. This state becomes one that is considered sacred. Sacrifice, and therefore death, is intertwined with Bataille’s concept of immanence; the act of sacrificing a living thing gives the sacrifier a glimpse through the window of death into immanence. Often, near-miss events that border on death, as is the case with the events experienced by myself and my two interviewees, are also windows into immanence; often, the portrayal of such events in forms of media is such that death (in the realm that we experience) is the window to some Universal secret that is greater that any knowledge that we can gain by just living.
Bataille, Georges. “Animality”. Theory of religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992Bataille, in a separate piece of work entitled Hegel, Death and Sacrifice, explores the topic of death through the lens of philosopher Georg Hegel. A fascinating facet of Bataille’s 3 exploration is the ‘pleasurable’ aspect of death: the emotions associated with the act of dying are both ‘erotic’, and revealing of a truer self. Perhaps this pleasure posits death, being a tabooed subject, as embodying Michael Taussig’s notion of the public secret. Everyone is fascinated by death, not necessarily in an entirely negative way, but no one wants to discuss it. Near-miss events that have to do with death, or Near Death Experiences (NDEs) allow these conversations to be had. Or, at least, the conversations had in the wake of an NDE (between the experiencer of the NDE and their peers) allow for a glimpse at the utter fascination that we all have with the act of dying and returning to a state of being like water in water.4
NDE is a broad term, and therefore takes on multiple definitions. Some experience NDEs in a heavily spiritual way, often dramatically displayed by television and movies like the experience of returning from death or dipping your toes in the pool of death builds a bridge to an ‘other side’. Some NDEs, though, are simply categorized by the experience of being in a perilous state that puts you near death, and do not have an extra-dimensional component. Here, I am defining an NDE as an experience that brings an individual close to death, through a medical event or accident, and not necessarily one in which the experiencer physically dies. However, either way, I argue that both kinds of near-miss events serve a similar role: that “the returnee is not paled by the experience with death but empowered by the privilege of glimpsing the ‘other
Bataille, Georges, and Jonathan Strauss. “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.” Yale French Studies, no. 78, 3 1990, pp. 9–28. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2930112. Accessed 5 May 2021.
Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford (Calif.): Stanford 4 UP, 1999. Print.
side’”. Knowing death on a more intimate level is the ultimate self-exploration tool. But often, 5 as I explore through my research (both ethnographic and otherwise), the experience of and NDE is ineffable to those who have never been in a similar situation.
Mahler Meyerrose is 22-year-old student at Mcgill University in Montreal. We met when we were 18—5 days before both of us were thrown from that bus that was careening down a mountainous road toward the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Mahler and I have our meeting over zoom which we laugh about because it seems so formal—she is my close friend. Part of our distinct and inexplicable bond, we acknowledge, is the shared experience of neardeath trauma, the indescribable experience of being thrown, quite literally, into a time in which we came of age and the adrenaline-filled, sometimes dangerous events that followed. But while we endured the same event—the realization that we were crashing, the expulsion from the bus, the chaotic and long period that preceded the arrival of medical personnel, the arrival at the hospital—Mahler’s experience differs from mine, significantly. Mahler and I feel tense, at first, not sure how to talk about the shared episode of almost-dying, as well as the admitted shared episode of transgression that followed in a setting that feels more formal and academic. Her eyes light up, however, when I express feelings about the crash, in order to prompt her own answers. She utters something I have, too, many times before: “I can only really talk about this with you or [my significant other]. It’s hard to describe just how…weirdly good if felt”.6
Good? Death is equip with pleasure? Oddly, yes, both Mahler and Bataille describe. Bataille says that “death is at the base of eroticism. The feeling of sin is connected in lucid
5 Revisited.” Sociology, vol. 42, no. 4, 2008, p. 756
Lee, Raymond L.M. “Modernity, Mortality and Re-Enchantment: The Death Taboo
A Note: Mahler’s significant other was in the same bus crash that we were in 6
consciousness to the idea of death, and in the same manner the feeling of sin is connected with pleasure”. Mahler describes this feeling as not erotic, necessarily, but euphoric. Like a high. 7 She described it as a “liberating feeling…the very moment itself was like a weirdly euphoric, very spiritual moment”. Eroticism, liberation, euphoria…especially in regards to something like dying, which is publicly acknowledged as somber, these feelings seem immensely taboo.
Bataille’s connecting of sin and death to pleasure is incredibly astute. The feelings that we may have when we narrowly escape death like relief, or a greater sense of knowledge about how to live your life, are a Callois-esque festival of sorts. Mahler said to me that she thinks “it was a 8 very unique experience...that really crazy good feeling is like…it’s like drugs. But I’ve done drugs since, and never felt like that again”.
The conversations born out of the telling and retelling of NDEs also reveals a line of transgression. It’s odd, it even feels slightly wrong, for Mahler and I to look at each other over zoom and say: being that close to death didn’t feel extremely terrifying. Neither Mahler and I died or met God, but Mahler described to me a moment that I remember well, where death seemed inevitable. She said that “There was this one very specific moment even before I got injured and I think that was right when I felt the bus tipping, I could see out of the window and there was just a cliff…So at that moment I was like ‘fuck, we’re not getting out of this’”. It was then that the euphoria was born. I remember looking out at the cliff, my journal in hand, and it was almost serenely quiet. No one screamed. And then in the aftermath, of course, came the blood and the shouting and crying. People want to know about the feeling of being close to
Bataille, Georges, and Jonathan Strauss. “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.” Yale French Studies, no. 78, 7 1990, p. 23
Hollier, Denis. "Festival." The College of Sociology (1937-39). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1988. 8 Print.
death (and of course, the subsequent procedures of getting better—how injured were you, what was the hospital like, etc.). But of course the question what was it like is unanswerable. It’s unanswerable qualities are, though, part of what makes the experience so intriguing to others. Mahler adds to her statement, “and, of course, part of the feeling that we had escaped something came afterward”; she is referring to the fact that crashes involving the kind of sleeper bus we were on seem to be relatively common, and most of the headlines that announce them include 10, 12, or even 36 dead.
My second interviewee, Halpin Burke, and I meet on Wesleyan’s campus. It’s a warm evening on Lawn Avenue and we finish our dinners while we talk about the excitement of getting our COVID-19 vaccines. We, too, begin our discussion timidly. Her story is different that mine and Mahler’s—notably so because she did not experience an accident, but a medical incident that came from within her own body. When Halpin was 18, in a completely unforeseeable event, she was suddenly made aware that her styloid bone, which unbeknownst to her was 4 times the length of a normal styloid bone, was curving toward her carotid artery. One day when she was walking to her car, her throat began feel “odd”—suddenly, it began to close and she started to cough up blood. She ran to her neighbor’s house and she was brought to the E.R., where she was put on a ventilator for 4 days while doctors attempted to figure out what had happened. A few weeks later, she underwent surgery to remove the bone, but describes both the experience of her throat closing up and the subsequent wait for the diagnosis/removal of the bone as something that made her “question [her] own body, question [her]self”. Halpin is clear: her NDE is not a high that she’s chasing. The sudden way in which a random medical event flipped her life upside
down made her crave normalcy. She laughs when she says to me: “a normal day? That’s my bliss”.
Something she tells me, however, contradicts this. In an accidental pivot from our conversation, she begins to tell me about the waiting period between receiving a diagnosis and traveling to her neighboring state of Tennessee to meet a specialist surgeon who could operate on her. The doctors in her hometown of St. Louis, Kentucky were not qualified to do so (she jokes, “this is why we need a better healthcare system! Write that down”). She describes the absolute fear that came with waiting for a whole week with no fix for her medical problem other than to stay calm and stay still. And then she says to me: “yeah well it was so weird, my parents let me go to a music festival in that week, actually”. This surprised me, but I tried not to show it. I know Halpin—she is safe and calculated. She actually described to me that when she was on the ventilator, and the styloid mystery had not been solved, the doctors thought her problem had been caused by drugs, and that’s what had caused her throat to close. When she told me this part of the story, she explained that her parents said to the doctor “ ‘no you don’t understand, she’s not that kind of girl’”. She then re-affirms their statement by looking me in the eye and saying to me: “like, I’m really scared of drugs”.
So why, in what she describes as the most “vulnerable” time in her life, would she attend a festival? The experience of standing in the space that delineates death and life can (and probably always does) cause trauma and anxiety, but it also provides the person who encounters an NDE with a feeling of something akin to invincibility (as in Mahler’s case) and utter relief (as in Halpin’s). The “good” feeling of the moment, could perhaps be scientifically explained away by adrenaline or, by those who study NDEs from a religious perspective, the presence of Godliness
(which, obviously, can have a plethora of meanings). However, going back to Bataille’s exploration of Hegel’s views on death, perhaps it is that death (as explored through sacrificial death) is followed by ‘gay anguish/anguished gaiety’. Bataille says that “…ultimately, gay anguish, anguished gaiety cause me, in a feverish chill, ‘absolute dismemberment,’ where it is my joy that finally tears me apart, but where dejection would follow joy were I not torn all the way to the end…”. The phrase ‘gay anguish’ perhaps describes the hard-to-outline boundary 9 that separates life and death, and describes the feeling of being almost-dead and then suddenly very euphorically alive. It is a feeling that confuses: are you to celebrate (your temporary invincibility)? Or are you to mourn (the person you were before you looked death in the face)?
The way people reacted to Halpin’s experience varied. Some people she knew withdrew completely—they didn’t want to be near the hospital, or know about the details of her medical journey. Some were overly involved, in a way that bordered on uncomfortable. She says that “some of my friends came with their parents, and some people sat and just prayed for me and like…I’m not religious, but I was like oh that’s so nice…but they’re doing that for themselves”. People crossed boundaries with their questions about what exactly happened, how she knew something was wrong, what her symptoms were. Halpin expresses to me that she answered these questions despite not really even knowing how she felt about it, or if she even wanted to talk about it to anyone. Mahler said a similar thing: “when I got home, I just had to talk about it to everyone, and not even in a way that I felt like was genuine”.
Something else Halpin said, after I inquired whether she felt the experience had a spiritual element, felt oddly familiar. She told me that in the minutes before anything went wrong, when Bataille, Georges, and Jonathan Strauss. “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.” Yale French Studies, no. 78, 9 1990, p. 24
she was just collecting her keys and walking out to her car, she called her dad out of intuition. She said to him “‘dad, you need to get here, something really weird is happening’”. She then tells me that she has no clue why she did that. In the minutes before my bus crashed, I was writing in my journal; a poem I knew would not leave my head, and so I was reflecting on it. The poem was Louise Gluck’s “The Wild Iris”, the first lines of which are: “At the end of my suffering/there was a door/Hear me out: that which you call death/I remember”. I wrote those 10 words down and then only minutes later my journal was catapulted along with my body out of the window. When I left the scene of the accident hours later, I did so without my shoes, which had somehow left my feet and disappeared into the mountainside, without my backpack, which had been ripped to shreds, without my earrings, most of which had torn out of my ears on impact, but as I walked away from the crash site, I somehow found my journal.
NDE experiences seem to universally mark a period of transgression, both in the sense that their experiencers violate the norm by being categorized as “near-dead” rather than just alive or dead, but also that subsequent period seems to allow for transgressive incidents (Halpin’s music festival, Mahler’s use of drugs). In As Neves, Galicia, Spain, there is a yearly festival that celebrates defeating death, called the Fiestas de Santa Marta de Ribarteme. During this festival, individuals who have had NDEs in the year preceding the festival will lie in coffins, mimicking the death they narrowly escaped, while they are carried through the streets by their family and friends. Most of the headlines for articles describing the festival include the words “morbid”, “odd” or “strange”. Roger Caillois, in his lecture entitled Festival hypothesizes that festivals 11
Gluck, Louise. “The Wild Iris.” The Wild Iris, HarperCollins, 1992, Lines 1-4 10
Minder, Raphael. "Playing Dead for a Day in Gratitude for Being Spared." The New York Times. The 11 New York Times, 03 Aug. 2017. Web. 11 May 2021.
exist for the sake of relief. Festivals purposefully allow you to exist in a place of celebration, chaos, oddity, taboo, perhaps even morbidity to rebirth individuals, perhaps return them to sacredness. Halpin didn’t mention the name of the musical festival she went to, but it does not 12 matter; despite her being safe, calculated, afraid of drugs and intensely enjoying of normalcy, the somber act of almost dying required relief. At the start of the interview, she said to me that following the accident she “woke up every day and was like ‘woah, I’m so happy to be alive’. I was extremely grateful, and tried to act like it. But—you can’t really always live that way? It’s impossible to continue to live that way…”. The period of elation that came with realizing that life is precious, sacred even, was festival-like, even if she did not have to lie in her own coffin to feel such elation and gratitude.
The topic of NDEs is quite popular in the media these days, in both fictional and nonfiction work. There was even a Filipino woman who ‘vlogged’ the bus crash that I was in,
picking up her somehow unharmed camera at the crash site and filming her dirty, bloodied face as she repeated “thank God I’m alive” and then to her husband “Thank God you’re alive”. 13 There are many “storytimes” on youtube that cover the topic, in videos dramatically entitled “I DIED…but” or “The Day I Almost Died”. Sometimes these videos are graphic, not just in description but in visuals: images of bloody stitches, a woman’s hand post-amputation, a man laying unconscious in a hospital bed, his body swollen and covered in wires. Science-Fiction 14
12 Print.
Hollier, Denis. "Festival." The College of Sociology (1937-39). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1988.
13 v=KirVQXlG4bk&t=307s
IT WAS LIFE OR DEATH. Ian & Mar. Youtube, 14 Oct. 2017. Web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
14 v=4RlBVzUCYek&t=536s
I DIED…but. ThreadBanger Youtube, 3 Aug, 2019. Web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
shows like to show us what could be on the other side of death: a utopia, a dystopia, another dimension, a heaven, a hell. The point is, near-miss events that involve death have become a genre of storytelling (both fiction and non-fiction). They are a point of bonding for NDE survivors, and answer questions posed by the public at large about what death may look like. This genre, however, also is a vessel for the discussion of other topics such as the universal experiences of transgression, taboo, metamorphosis, growth, trauma. Mahler and I are bonded over the fact that we experienced trauma, but also because it opened up a space of instant vulnerability, where the stories we told to each other were not limited because of what we had experienced. Despite spacial and temporal separations between Halpin’s experience and mine, our conversations that spun off from that of death felt intimate, and warm.
Bataille, in Theory of Religion, discusses the notion of the sacred. Immanency is sacred, but what makes it sacred is the inherent lack of knowing that immanency implies. Borrowing 15 again from Louise Gluck, she aptly states, from the perspective of an Iris that “it is terrible to survive/as consciousness/buried in the dark earth”. Of course this refers to a fetal flower, 16 pushing with weak might against the earth. However, the idea of surviving as a muted and buried consciousness is similar to how Bataille posits humans are living, given that they have the knowledge that immanence exists. We are constantly trapped by utility. He says, even that “… the correct way to speak of [a universe without a conscious man] can overtly only be poetic, in that poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable”. NDE narratives, like 17 the ones I exchanged with and collect from Mahler and Halpin, are storytelling vessels of the
15
16
Bataille, Georges.
Gluck, Louise.
Bataille, Georges.
sacred. They are poetic in that they are somewhat beautiful, but ultimately unable to be genuinely translated into colloquial and fully understandable terms.
It is the very essence of living to walk along fine lines. The crossing of these lines is inevitable. The transgressive nature of action/feeling following NDEs serves a festival-like purpose in that the expense of this negative energy, of this relief does tend realign one with the daily strides of those who have not experienced a state near-death. Even still, attempting to peel off from a structural-functionalist explanation, there is a basis of being changed post-NDE that is not able to be expended, erased, or that serves a societal purpose. The feeling goes beyond Bataille’s notion of the sacrifier and the sacrificed, beyond the typical festival-goer. Mahler, Halpin, Myself; Ian&Mar and all the youtube storytellers; those carried in coffins in Galicia: all are threaded back into the fabric of society. Perhaps the window that gazes into immanence is cracked open, allowing our mind’s eye to have a vague but constant glimpse into a state of being beyond that which is human life as defined by utility and the search for the sacred.
Works Cited:
1. Bataille, Georges. “Animality”. Theory of religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992
2. Bataille, Georges, and Jonathan Strauss. “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.” Yale French Studies, no. 78, 1990
3. Gray, Garry. “The Sociology of Near Misses: A Methodological Framework For Studying Events That ‘Almost Happened.’” The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers Canadiens De Sociologie, vol. 43, no. 2, 2018
4. Gluck, Louise. “The Wild Iris.” The Wild Iris, HarperCollins, 1992, Lines 8-10
5. Hollier, Denis. "Festival." The College of Sociology (1937-39). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1988. Print.
6. Lee, Raymond L.M. “Modernity, Mortality and Re-Enchantment: The Death Taboo Revisited.” Sociology, vol. 42, no. 4, 2008
7. Minder, Raphael. "Playing Dead for a Day in Gratitude for Being Spared." The New York Times. The New York Times, 03 Aug. 2017. Web. 11 May 2021.
8. Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford (Calif.): Stanford UP, 1999. Print
9. IT WAS LIFE OR DEATH. Ian & Mar. Youtube, 14 Oct. 2017. Web: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=KirVQXlG4bk&t=307s
10. I DIED…but. ThreadBanger Youtube, 3 Aug, 2019. Web: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=4RlBVzUCYek&t=536s