Being-in-the-Tube

“The difficulty that had to be overcome… was to avoid all geometric evidence. In other words, I had to start with a sort of intimacy of roundness.” —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958

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“Waneth the watch but the world holdeth.” —The Seafarer

“Where do we find ourselves?” That’s the question Emerson asks in his essay “Experience” (1844). To modify, where do we find ourselves when we are in the tube? And why are we there? Why do we traverse the seven seas for fleeting rides through liquid tunnels? What does the endless stream of photos, films, and clips of the inner space say about our tribe and its totemic fetishism? 

A few years ago, I found myself in Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof, one of Europe’s largest train stations. Searching for the platform that would take me to Freiburg, where I was to attend a conference, I came across a giant screen with a repeating slow-motion water shot of a surfer pulling into a gaping barrel at what was almost certainly Pipeline. Standing in a jet-lagged haze, entranced by the crystalline portal, thoughts of another kind took form. 

My location had something to do with it. Standing in this German transport hub, my mind turned to the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose thought had long held, and continues to hold, a certain fascination. Widely considered the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and indeed the entire Western canon, Heidegger put “being” itself back on the map after almost 2,500 years of Platonic abstraction. Aiming to reverse our longstanding “forgetfulness of Being,” Heidegger’s existential analysis sought to understand concrete, lived experience and how humans navigate and find meaning in a world increasingly dominated by technology. 

What held my attention in Frankfurt wasn’t so much the wave itself, or the surfer, but the hollow space, the void, unto which everything else seemed to revolve. It’s precisely the relation between form and void that Heidegger questions in his mind-bending essay “The Thing” (1951). Taking a ceramic jug as his subject, he thinks “being” from the inside out. It is not the structure and walls of the jug that make it a thing, but its capacity to hold, gather, and pour. Let me elaborate before turning to how this might apply to the pinnacle of wave sliding, where being-in-the-tube opens onto deeper questions of our amphibious mode of being-in-the-world.

Form and Void 

From his early magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), to his later work, Heidegger’s central focus remains the question of being—not as an abstruse technical analysis of the verb “to be,” but as an inquiry into how things appear to us as the things they are. A wave can appear as something to be ridden and embraced, something violent and threatening, or as just another of nature’s mindless material processes. What interests Heidegger is this multiplicity of relations, the way things connect to other things and how humans uniquely grasp and shape these complex relationships. 

Using the example of the pottery jug, Heidegger illustrates this in “The Thing.” A jug reveals itself as a unified multiplicity of characteristics, values, and uses. It can hold water or wine, fill space on a kitchen shelf, hold open a book, or be admired for the color of its glaze or design. Yet the essence of the jug isn’t found in the clay it’s made from but in the void its form creates and what that void can gather and offer. The empty space within the jug is what allows it to receive, hold, and pour. This is what Heidegger refers to in his ponderous phrase: “The thing things.” 

What the potter really does is give shape to emptiness. While science would reduce this void to a collection of air molecules and electromagnetic vibrations, Heidegger insists that such explanations miss the essential nature of the jug as something meaningful and generous. In its capacity to gather and pour, the jug is a bearer of gifts and offerings. 

A wave breaks when its height reaches roughly one-seventh of its length, causing the crest to outrun the base. As the wave moves into shallower water, the bottom slows while the top maintains momentum, creating that brief hollow we call the tube. But the tube is more than an aquatic vortex to be explained by container physics and geometry. Like the jug, with its form and void, the wave has a capacity to allow a surfer to enter, be captured, and be released. And, like the jug, it reveals this capacity not on its own but by gathering elements. The essence of the tube is not the wave itself but the void around which fourfold elements gather. 

The Fourfold 

Things gather different aspects of our world and in doing so illuminate that world. Heidegger uses the image of a “clearing” (Lichtung)—a forest meadow where things shine forth in a unified structure he calls “the Fourfold” (das Geviert): earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. This emphasis on gathering comes from the old German sense of “thing” as an assembly. A bridge, for instance gathers the landscape, the river, the clouds, and ourselves. Through our encounter with the bridge, our way of being-in-the-world becomes apparent, as does the bridge itself and all to which it relates. The bridge opens up a place within which things are disclosed and brought to appearance. It is in such spaces that human beings find themselves. 

Like the bridge, the tube is a passageway, a portal. It is also a sacred space to enter and exit—a living, breathing temple. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1950), Heidegger likens the ancient Greek temple to the work of art in its capacity to make visible what is otherwise invisible. The work of the temple, like the work of art, is to open up a world of beings, to show things in their emergence, to give humans an outlook on themselves. He writes:

Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm manifest in its violence. The lustre and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and come to appear as what they are. The Greeks called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things physis. It illuminates also that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth.

As a gathering place where earth, sky, divinities, and mortals converge, the temple is an eye-opener into being. Like the temple, the tube creates a clearing where boundaries between surfer and wave, inside and outside, self and world, temporarily dissolve. As a fluid architectural form, it frames and illuminates the world—not through steadfastness but motion, not through stone but water. 

Tube Time 

Time, like space, reveals itself differently in the tube. The ancient Greeks distinguished between chronos (sequential, measurable time) and kairos (the right or opportune moment). While chronos can be counted, kairos must be seized or chanced upon. This distinction matters because our relationship to time shapes our relationship to the world. Late modern life ever operates in chronos—scheduled, quantified, controlled—despite its tendency to whizz by. We check our phones and watches, count our steps, track our sleep cycles, yet in all this calculating, we forget being. But not in the tube. The tube is the time-space of kairos, a portal into being itself. Unless you’re surfing in a wave pool, you cannot pull into a barrel on demand. In a mode of what Heidegger calls “releasement” from the chronosphere and the will to control, ocean surfers linger and let the gathering appear. 

The tube is more than an aquatic vortex to be explained by physics and geometry. With its form and void, the wave has a capacity to allow a surfer to enter, be contained, and be released.

Inside the tube, time stretches and bends. Surfers often describe a slowing down, a phenomenon neuroscience attributes to heightened sensory processing under conditions of deep focus and adrenaline. The more perceptually complex the situation, the slower time seems to pass. Yet again, scientific explanations, while valid, can take us only so far. The gathering quality of kairotic time is what Heidegger calls a “moment of vision” (Augenblick), where past, present, and future coalesce. In the tube, the years of oceanic attunement that led to this singular moment, the immediate demands of the present, and the anticipated exit all merge. Surfing is not clockwork but follows what Henri Bergson called durée—a continuous flow of time as directly experienced. Moreover, the view from within a barrel is uniquely human. Why? Because human vision is not the same as animal eyesight. Vision is cognitive, aesthetic, and historical, in addition to being ocular and organic. When Dante enjoins us to open our eyes, to see the glory of the heavenly constellations, he meant above all our mental eyes, through which the order of the cosmos becomes apparent. 

The tube is the hierophany of surfing as a ritual. The process begins on the beach and paddling out. To leave the shore is to cross a limen, or threshold, where we find ourselves suspended from ordinary time, duties, identities. In anthropological terms, we have shifted from structure to anti-structure, a space of transformative potential and renewal, shared by a community of fellow initiates. Offshore, we have dipped out of chronos and entered sacred or timeless time. 

Out Into 

If there is something sacred about the tube, it points to the larger sacredness of the ocean and our planet’s waters, which are older than the sun. Getting tubed is simply a high point. Water is inspirited and, along with being the source of all life, is itself alive. Every body of water, every river, lake, sea, and stream breathes with its own inspiration. Reverence for the earth’s waters isn’t a mere human projection but a receptivity to something that emanates from the rivers and oceans themselves. After all, like the earth’s surface, three-quarters of our lungs, brains, and hearts are water, meaning that our sentience is mostly aqueous. In that case, the stream of consciousness isn’t merely a metaphor but a fluid state of being. 

For Thales (c. 624–546 BCE), the first Greek philosopher, water is the arche, the first principle—all is water. This fundamental insight is echoed in the mathematical patterns that water naturally assumes—from the Fibonacci spirals of ocean waves to the hexagonal structure of snowflakes. These patterns aren’t imposed on water but emerge from its essential properties, just as the Fibonacci sequence emerges not from arbitrary rules but natural growth processes. In the tube, we don’t merely observe these patterns; we are folded into them. 

Just as life itself on our wandering planet started in the sea, we all begin our lives in the womb. The uterine conditions are the first of many spherical spaces we will inhabit, from rooms to homes, cities to apartments, social bubbles, islands, globes, and, occasionally, barreling waves. In our amphibious condition, we should learn to speak the language of water, as Gaston Bachelard suggests: “Water is the mistress of fluid language, of language without a jolt, of continuous and continued language, of language which renders rhythm supple and which gives a uniform matter to different rhythms.” 

For all its merit, Heidegger’s thinking of being-in-the-world can seem overly arid and earthly. Despite his proclivity for dryness, his fundamental observation that existence is always “being-in” still stands. Under the sheltering sky, being-in-the-world means there is no outside. The simplest answer to Emerson’s question is always “in” one space or another, in the midst of things. 

We check our phones and watches, count our steps, track our sleep cycles, yet in all this calculating, we forget being. But not in the tube. The tube is the time-space of kairos, a portal into being itself.

Building on Heidegger’s insights on “being-in,” Germany’s most important contemporary philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, dedicates his monumental Spheres trilogy to exploring how human beings replicate uterine conditions at different scales. For Sloterdijk, being is always “being-in-asphere,” a shared space with an inner climate and immunological properties (i.e., self-preservation). Medial existence, from bubbles to spheres to globes, suggests that human life is nothing more than the perpetuation of uterine conditions by other means. 

Heidegger’s student and lover, Hannah Arendt, who went on to become another of the twentieth century’s great philosophers (despite rejecting that title), offers us a complementary perspective. Having understood the insights of the jug, the way things shine forth, she developed a concept of her own, which she called “natality.” Unlike Heidegger’s focus on our awareness of our own mortal finitude, what he called “beingtoward- death,” Arendt centers her philosophy on birth and beginnings. We are not only born once, but our life is a continuous process of birth and rebirth within the world, within a single life. Natality is our fundamental human capacity to begin and to create what has not existed before. 

Alongside natality, and despite—or perhaps because of—witnessing the atrocities of WWII as a German Jew, Arendt championed the concept of amor mundi—love of the world. To love and care for the world means accepting it as it is while working to renew it. Amor mundi involves a commitment to the common world that structures our collective lives and connects us to past and future generations. It calls us to preserve what is valuable from the past while making space for new beginnings. For Arendt, love of the world means engaging in the vita activa versus withdrawing, even when—especially when—the world seems on the verge of becoming a wasteland. 

In surfing, particularly its crescendo of being-in-the-tube, we experience both natality and amor mundi in concentrated form. Each session, each wave, each barrel is a rebirth back into the world, our only home. Oceanic communion brings not only pleasure but also self-dissolving love for a world that makes wave sliding possible. This third stone from the sun is the only place in the known universe where life exists, and on top of that vital improbability and generosity, we have been given the gift of surfing. 

Carl Sagan famously said that when we look at the universe through a telescope, it is the universe looking at itself. We might scoff at those surfers who raise their arms upon being spit out a barrel, but perhaps, like a dancing star, it is the universe celebrating itself. And perhaps that moment of ecstatic vision epitomizes our human condition, which is not unlike a wave—a vortex thrown forward yet turned in on itself, obliterated and drawn back into its source, as indicated by the delightful, paradoxical, compound preposition: out into. In the wondrous ecstasy of being-in and coming-out-of a tube, are we not riding the breath of Gaia—exhaled into the aqueous clearing between earth and sky, born anew as mortals among divinities?

[All photos by Matt Clark]