What Dawes and Kinsella provide each other with is less a means of achieving perfect insight than of casting light on the other’s blindnesses. Both do literally have eye problems as well. Dawes takes eye drops for his glaucoma and describes ‘the impulse of the body / to close all apertures’. The body politic’s natural impulse when faced with a perceived threat is similarly to close off borders. The overriding message of Speak From Here to There, though, is this: reject the false consolations of belonging; there is no other kind of existence than co-existence.
