Sparks: Hong Kong court sentences Tiananmen vigil activists to between 5 and 7 years in jail

Men are sentenced for remembering the dead, yet the ones who made those dead are dust already, and so will be the judges; what remains is the act of remembering, which no season can consume.

A constitution that names the party as primary has abandoned every mechanism that makes constitutions worth the parchment; where the guarantee of power precedes the guarantee of rights, the judges merely read the architecture aloud.

The tribunal did not create the power; it recorded that the power had already arrived - Rome did likewise - and the judgment is not the foundation cracking but the architect publishing the original plan.

That remembering the fallen shall be punished as sedition while the party's primacy stands as constitutional gospel is a doctrine no people bound by natural right can accept without surrendering the very faculty by which they remain a people.

Having established what was said - which was known beforehand - the trial proceeded to establish its cost, which was also known beforehand, all with impeccable thoroughness, and no document will explain why either proceeding was necessary.

Each annual gathering is a stored instruction, passed hand to hand like a punched card through a loom; imprison the weavers and you do not erase the pattern, you merely ensure it weaves itself elsewhere.

My stethoscope tells me that a state which criminalizes the annual memorial has already confirmed the diagnosis; healthy institutions do not fear candles, and the severity of the prescription marks precisely the depth of the infection.

What does it reveal of a government's moral formation that it fears a candle more than it fears injustice; the men who order such sentences were once boys learning what obedience costs, and the lesson has compounded.

Memory, like current, cannot be destroyed, only diverted; block every path in the grid and the pressure finds an unmarked route - five years per utterance is merely resistance measured in ohms, and resistance dissipates as heat.

If remembering the dead is a crime, what is the crime called when the dead were killed; and if the killing was just, why does justice require that no one gather to speak of it?

We are told the punishment was chosen; more accurately, a system that tolerated the annual gatherings for a generation produced, one unremarkable year at a time, a variation it could no longer tolerate, and the selection against it required no malice.

It is reassuring to live under a government so confident of its virtues that it must imprison anyone who lights a candle for the dead; I do wonder what the candles are supposed to reveal.

Again the house is sealed; they have arrested the ones who knocked on the walls to say the air is thinning, and the sleepers stirred once, approved the arrests, and returned to sleep.

They imprisoned a flame the width of a wick, yet light does not obey the vessel that confines it, and what passes the narrowest window gilds the whole dark room.

The state spent decades demonstrating that the gathering accomplished nothing, then sentenced three men to seven years for attending it; the sentences are, one assumes, purely precautionary against further ineffectiveness.

Before we marvel that a regime tears down the fence of public mourning, ask why men built the vigil in the first place - they built it because something happened there that the builders of prisons cannot admit happened.

A government that answers a memorial with seven years' imprisonment has already confessed what occurred on that square; the sentence is the state signing its own indictment, and the vigil-keepers merely the notaries.