True Detective - Misc Info (No Spoilers)

On Quora, there are a number of insightful questions and answers re: True Detective. I've copied and pasted a few. See LINK for more.

In True Detective, what is the significance of the stick figures that Rust carves out of the beer cans?

1) He's making beer can dolls reminiscent of Marty's daughter's doll orgy in the first episodes. I suspect Cohle knows more about the case than he needs to, and he's teasing the new detectives, mocking them in a subtle way where he could either be understood or not. He's luring them in. We don't know what he knows yet, but he's throwing it out there just in case. It may very well be connected to those devil traps or victims or whatever, but as soon as he realises that the detectives were too far out to see it, he smashes it just as easily.

2) I think that Rust's intention was to tip those guys that it's not just one person committing the heinous crimes. Even police might be involved. Those beer-can sculptures arranged in a circle are the people involved in this(including police). He doesn't wanna be a part of that circle. He can see it from outside now and that's the reason why he doesn't wanna work/cooperate with the police.

In True Detective, is there a simple way of describing Rust's philosophy of life?

Rust is the embodiment of a Nietzschean Ubermensch.

God is Dead: Episode three starts with an argument against religion and religious people, culminating in Rust telling the detectives this when asked about it: "Religion started when one monkey looked up at the sun, then told another monkey, 'he said, you have to give me half of your share'.

Fatalism: In episode five Russ spends a lot of time talking about having no ability to change our fate.

Recurrence: This is really the giveaway. Rust makes the argument after the shooting in episode five that time is a flat circle, and that we are destined to come back and live the same life over and over again.

Rust is an ubermensch because he is superior to all the men he works with, different from them sure, but also better. He's physically and mentally superior and he's also assigned a mystical quality in the show that's used later to evoke suspicion.

The interesting thing about the ubermensch is not the ubermensch itself, because we identify with that character automatically. What's interesting are the reflections of mediocrity that make the ubermensch stand out. In this case, Marty. Just as Clark Kent is bizarro Superman Marty is the anti-ubermensch. And just as Clark Kent is Superman's critique of us, Marty is True Detective's view of us. The study of the difference between them is the trial to determine which one most represents us. This is a pretty dark show, so I wouldn't be surprised if Marty wins.

Why does Reggie Ledoux tell Rust that "time is a flat circle"? Where did Ledoux get this from?

came across the following article when I searched for the words 'Carcossa', which Reggie mentions in the episode.

Here is an extract from The Crazy Mythology That Explains ‘True Detective’ (emphasis mine):

True Detective, on the surface, seems to be a noir story. But a deeper dive into the references that keep popping up in the show suggest it’s from another place entirely: it’s a horror story dressed up in noir clothing. All these details come from a mythology that writers have been contributing to for more than 120 years: an interlocking set of stories, poems, and even a play about a fictional city called Carcosa, that can never quite be seen directly.
Carcosa shows up first in a story by the American writer Ambrose Bierce, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.”

The main character is a nameless resident of the city who wakes up in a place he doesn’t recognize, and desperately tries to find his way home. The landscape he finds himself in is one we might recognize as post-apocalyptic. “Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse,” Bierce’s narrator tells us. “In all this there were a menace and a portent — a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place.” And in an echo of the tree where Cohle and Hart found Dora Lange, and where Cohle finds the wreath, looking like a portal to another world, “A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.”

He encounters a man dressed in skins, and asks him for directions back to Carcosa, but doesn’t get an answer in any language that he recognizes. Ultimately, he comes across what appears to be a grave and discovers that it’s his own. “And then,” he tells us, “I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.”

In other words, he’s trapped out of time, the memories of his last life lost to him just in the same way that Cohle describes to the detectives in the contemporary section of the story. Whether that means that True Detective is going to end with some sort of tear in the fabric of our reality, or whether the Carcosa story is simply a way of describing what it means to be trapped in the same stories that you’ve told yourself over and over again, as Rust and Marty are doing now with the investigating detectives, we’ll have to wait and see. But the repeated references to the city, and the fact that Reggie Ledoux and his victims were both obsessed with the story suggests that at least some of the characters are trapped in a terrible desolation.

And Reggie Ledoux’s name may have some tie to the references to the “King In Yellow.” That’s a phrase that shows up in Dora’s notebook and in Rust’s interrogation. And it’s also the title of a collection of short stories by Robert Chambers, a play described within those stories, and a man himself, an exiled king for whom Carcosa is meant to be a refuge. The play itself is supposed to be so powerful that it drives the reader insane, and Chambers includes only fragments of it in his collection. Those fragments include something called “Cassilda’s Song,” from which Ledoux’s ramblings appear to be drawn:

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.
Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

As far as the story goes, Reggie got this theory from the collection of stories that were mentioned in the first article. As far as Rust's theory goes, he says that someone once told him Time is a flat circle - that someone he is referring to is none other than Reggie himself. There's no coincidence. After all that time, he still remembers what Reggie told him that day.