On July 20, 1969, I was an art student at Sam Houston State University, attending the university’s summer study program in Puebla, Mexico. That evening, a group of us went to see 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

When we stepped out of the theater into the warm, balmy night, the streets were alive with excitement. At first I thought it was some sort of political demonstration; there was a lot of that in the 60's. Crowds were cheering and chanting. Newsboys darting through the streets selling newspapers; the headlines shouted:

¡EL HOMBRE EN LA LUNA!

Man on the Moon!

I kept a copy of that newspaper for years. Somewhere along the way it disappeared into the archives of my life, wherever those lost treasures go when, often putting things into storage and then leaving the country for a few years.

Only moments earlier that evening I had watched an ape hurl a bone into the air. The bone became a spacecraft drifting silently through space, eventually making its graceful approach toward Clavius Base on the Moon.  Arthur C. Clarke’s story and Stanley Kubrick’s astonishing vision of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY had completely overwhelmed my senses.

That night; only vaguely aware of what was happening in the heavens above. NASA’s astronauts were on their way to a place where no man had ever gone before, and being far from home and even farther from the daily television reports. Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather—my familiar Houston companions—were hundreds of miles away.  Attention at that time was keenly fixed instead on Mexican art, history, culture, and the constant struggle to master watercolor techniques.

Suddenly, at that moment, the movie wasn’t simply entertainment. It became something deeply personal.

It was about life itself—the closing of one chapter and the uncertain beginning of another.

Already living with a quiet spiritual uneasiness and questioning my direction as an artist. Kubrick’s film stirred that uncertainty into something much larger.

The movie ended.

My mind was just beginning.

What message was Kubrick and Clarke trying to tell me?

Walking out of that theater, seemingly life changed almost instantly.

Rushing back to the Hotel Colonial, remembering there was a small black-and-white television in the lobby. Hopeing to catch the latest reports on the lunar landing. A small crowd had already gathered around the set. Squeezing  between shoulders, hearing the words that would echo across history:

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the Moon.

The collision of Kubrick’s fictional future and Armstrong’s very real present altered something inside me. Over the next several years, my artwork took a dramatically different direction.

Instead of painting the light reflected into my eyes, I began painting the darkness inside my mind.

Not darkness in any demonic sense, as some might imagine. Rather, I became fascinated with the beauty that exists within blackness itself. Think Rothko and 50 shades of black with a screaming streak of color. After all, it is the contrast between darkness and the light that allows brilliance to exist at all.

Perhaps a little afraid of what I might discover by venturing deeper into that darkness. Perhaps that fear was exactly why I went there.

The change wasn’t immediate. It took a few years. Gradually realizing that my devotion to art—and my search for a deeper understanding of life—was leading me into places where I could very easily lose myself,  never to return to the light.  Eventually I came to believe that changing course wasn’t a surrender.

It was a survival.

The message carried away from that movie was not about spaceships or intelligent life beyond the stars. It was that no matter how sophisticated technology becomes, humanity continues on the same ancient journey. We are born. We grow. We love. We create. We grow old. We die.

The cycle continues.

Now fifty-seven years later, now an old man standing on the edge of dementia, and the memory of that night still floods my soul with the same emotions felt the first time hearing the deep warning of the baritone saxophone and the booming timpani in Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra thundering through the theater.

Why do those opening chords still rattle me today just as they did in 1969?

Perhaps it’s time to pop the hood—or the bonnet, for my friends across the Atlantic—and take a closer look at what has been running underneath all these years.

Who was Zarathustra?

Nietzsche used him as the voice of a free spirit striving toward possibilities beyond the ordinary limits of humanity.

Strauss offered a different explanation of his music:

“I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically. I meant rather to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch." ["Nietzsche’s concept of an individual who transcends conventional morality to create their own values and fully affirm life on Earth", a superman.]

Now, after all these years, I finally begin to understand the strange attraction that has drawn me back to that night again and again, like a moth circling an old familiar flame.

Clarke and Kubrick—thank you.

It has been a wonderful odyssey.

And somehow I suspect that night in Puebla was only the prelude.

What comes next?

I’ll cross that bridge over the bayou when the time comes.

© J. Michael Boland July 19, 2026