Warhol’s crystals

Warhol’s crystals are protective and healing objects whose significance lies in the gap between what they are meant to do and what happens around them. They are consulted, recharged, worn, and returned to a practitioner, yet roaches remain in the office kitchen and a bookstore assault still takes place. Their repeated failures do not end Andy Warhol’s reliance on them: when belief becomes difficult, he continues anyway, because, as the diary puts it, things could always be worse.

Protection in Everyday Life

The crystals appear not as abstract symbols but as objects expected to act upon particular troubles. At the office, a crystal in the kitchen is supposed to repel roaches. It does not. Vincent Fremont reports that the insects run around the clock in the stove, beneath the glass. The vividness of that detail makes the crystal’s failure difficult to keep at a distance: the promised protection is measured against pests moving through an ordinary appliance. Warhol plans to take the crystal back to Dr. Bernsohn again, making the remedy itself part of a repeated practical routine.

A separate entry notes that Tina Chow has gone out to get her crystal. The brief mention places the practice within a social world in which other people, too, obtain or use crystals; it does not establish that Chow’s crystal is the one in the kitchen. For Warhol, however, the objects are not interchangeable in purpose. Later he distinguishes a protective crystal, intended as prevention, from a healing share. The diaries thus record an informal system of objects and uses, while also showing how uncertain their effects remain in practice.

The Bookstore Assault and the Promise of Safety

After a woman assaults Warhol at a bookstore signing, the protective promise becomes painfully immediate. He has just obtained another magic crystal that is supposed to protect him and keep events like this from happening. The attack nevertheless occurs. Warhol describes himself as worn out and caught off guard; the incident happens quickly, and afterward he is physically hurt and shocked that no one warned him. The presence of people with cameras makes the scene public as well as frightening, but he continues signing for about an hour and a half, pretending that the event means nothing.

The crystal does not offer a simple explanation for that response. Warhol compares the experience to being shot again, then says it did not feel real and that he was playing the comedian, pleasing the people around him. He leaves with Bernard, pays him ten dollars, and goes home. He does not tell PH what happened when she calls about his trip to Washington the next morning; he says he cannot face telling her. The sequence sets outward performance beside private shock: the signing continues, but the event remains difficult to speak about.

The Crystal and the Healing Share

When Warhol sees Dr. Li after the assault, he does not tell her about the horrors of the preceding week. She examines him, pulls on his fingers, and says he is perfectly aligned. She also tells him that his crystal has been invaded, has low energy, and needs to be placed in the sun to recharge. Her account does not erase the assault; instead, it gives the crystal’s failure a new explanation and a prescribed response. Warhol wonders whether this means he is very strong or whether Dr. Li is, and records the limits of what she knows about his recent experience.

Warhol suspects that the bookstore assailant, rather than his brother, invaded the crystal. A possible family explanation had occurred to him because of comments he had made in an interview about his nephew, who left the priesthood to marry a Mexican nun, and the possibility that those comments had angered his brother. But he revises that suspicion and identifies the girl as the likely source of the invasion. The diary presents this as his changing interpretation, not as a confirmed cause of the assault or a demonstrable effect on the crystal.

At a later visit to Dr. Bernsohn, Warhol spells out the distinction between the objects: the share is for healing and is the round crystal he wears around his neck; the other crystal is protective and preventative. He acknowledges that the protective one did not help him at the bookstore, while leaving open the possibility that it helped in some way because he kept signing and did not panic. The uncertainty is central to the objects’ role. Their effects are not established by a clear success or failure; instead, Warhol interprets what happened through both the event and his own ability to endure it.

Doubt Without Abandonment

By December, Warhol is beginning to think that crystals do not work. He gathers several disappointments into a single reckoning: moths have left his rug with what he calls cancer, he has stepped on and crushed a beautiful old plastic ring, and he has been assaulted at a book signing despite carrying protective crystals. These are different kinds of harm, from damage to a household furnishing and a small treasured object to bodily danger, but together they challenge the crystals’ claim to ward off misfortune.

Even as he doubts, Warhol says he has to believe in something and will continue with the crystals. That conclusion does not restore confidence in their power; it records a decision to keep using them amid uncertainty. Across the diaries, crystals occupy the uneasy boundary between object and promise. The kitchen crystal can be seen beside the roaches it does not repel; the personal crystal can be blamed for being invaded, recharged, or credited with helping Warhol remain composed. Their material presence makes disappointment tangible, while their continued use shows that the need for protection survives the evidence against it.